


Eros - Alucard

by merrylulu



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Black Character(s), Eventual Romance, F/M, Light Angst, Mild Blood, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26771677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrylulu/pseuds/merrylulu
Summary: Eugenie, an intermediate necromancer, has travelled a long distance to find the Belmont Hold. And now that she has, she'll do just about anything to maintain her access to it. Even strike a deal with the devil himself.Or, as it appears, his son.
Relationships: Alucard (Castlevania) & Other(s), Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Original Character(s), Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> My knowledge on Castlevania lore is limited to the Netflix series and still, I might make a few mistakes. You can chalk it up to authorial blunder or authorial intent.

Grumpy Gertrude was on her last legs, Eugenie knew.

Though her irritation at the mare grew with every few feet she slowed in her riding, empathy grew to consume the anger. Gertrude had been riding all through the night and into the early hours of the morning, and she was one horse fulfilling the job of two, pulling a two-person cart.

Eugenie relaxed her grip on the reins and frowned at the back of the ginger horse’s head, at her thinning black mane greasy with sweat and early morning dew. She guessed though they never really got along, Gertrude must miss her former colleague, Lazy Louise, now more than ever. But they had run out of rations of fresh meat days ago, and with the pickings in the surrounding forest far too slim, Louise had had to be sacrificed for a greater cause.

That of keeping the bloodthirsty beast tied down by silver traps to a wooden bed at the back of Eugenie’s cart sated and satisfied.

Turning in her uncomfortable seat at the coach of the wagon, Eugenie crooked a finger through the slit in the curtains covering the cart and peered through the little triangle of space her finger created. In the darkness, a pair of gleaming red eyes stared right back into her brown ones, blank and emotionless. Through the triangle, the pungent scent of unwashed flesh, dried blood and decaying horse bits wafted up into Eugenie’s face.

Her nostrils flared. Thin streams of tears rolled down her cheeks as she hacked into the collar of her tunic. She removed her finger and let the curtain fall shut.

“Great ancestors,” she coughed, leaning over the side of her seat on the cart to gag. “When we reach the hold, I reckon we should just throw the whole cart away. That smell must be as much a part of it now as the nails or the wood itself. What say you, Gertrude?”

The mare couldn’t even muster the energy to feint a bucking to give Eugenie a good scare, as she was wont to do. Eugenie’s teasing question was met with the wet, sucking sounds of Gertrude’s hooves against the damp earth of the woodland, and the intermittent growling of the night creature in the back of the cart.

The amusement died at Eugenie’s lips. Picking up the reins again, she tried to urge Gertrude into a more determined trot. “Come on now, girl. We’re nearly there.” She said this with no substantial clue of how near to there they actually were, or at that point, where there was any longer.

She had embarked on this voyage to the Belmont Hold over five months ago, with only a vague idea of what direction to travel in, three good horses and a cart that had yet to start smelling like the deathbed of various forest creatures. Keeping mostly to the surrounding trails of villages and hamlets, only ever briefly stopping to hunt for fresh kills for her beast, defend her cart from opportunistic vagrants, or ask the hoi polloi of those villages and hamlets if she was still going the right way.

Aye, they’d tell her when they deigned to interact with her. What’s left of the Belmont Manor lay to the east, right on her path, though it boggled them what a young, unassuming girl such as she would want with the remnants of a family long excommunicated and exterminated. What she would want with the ashes of a family of monster hunters, pagans and every other unholy thing under the moon and the sun.

She always stayed long enough to wash up, have a bite to eat and a bit of rum to keep her warm for the night’s journey ahead. Long enough to raise suspicion as questions, but never long enough to answer them. She couldn’t.

The magick that maintained the working strength of the silver traps that kept her night creature bound and subdued had to be renewed every couple of hours or so. The sooner she got to the Belmont Manor, specifically to the place that was rumored to be under its ashes, the sooner she could work on never needing those silver traps again.

The sooner she could let Grumpy Gertrude loose to run far away into the wood and never look back. The sooner she could set that cart aflame and probably free the trapped souls of all the warthogs and deer and occasional rabbit she fed to her beast.

The sooner she could get her sister back.

Though Eugenie wouldn’t, couldn’t, admit it lest she give in to her own fatigue, Gertrude’s exhaustion was only rivalled by her own. She had been riding for weeks on end.

Sleeping for a handful of hours each night and spending the much of those hours snapping the necks of the men that tried to take advantage of a lone woman on the road. Yielding her own scrappy meals of what would be roasted rabbit and pork to her beast when her hauls were scanty and her night creature strained against its binds. She’d fallen asleep at the reins and awoken in different areas so many times she could only pray to her ancestors she remained on the right path.

Her coaxing was as much for herself as it was for Gertrude. How could she know where there was? She barely recognized here.

No hamlets in the surrounding areas, so no one to ask if she still traveled the right path. Nothing for miles in any direction but fog and forest. Crickets and fat frogs leaping in and out of thickets. The faint sound of rushing water that seemed to disappear as soon as Eugenie paid full attention to it.

And no animals. No rabbits, no deer, no wild pigs.

No food for Beasty.

Well, except for Gertrude, but Eugenie was still using Gertrude.

“Damnation.” She clasped her gloved hands together and leaned her elbows forward on her knees, her cloak whipping in the wind at her side.

Gertrude must have felt Eugenie’s stare at the back of her head, she must have felt its intensity, because Gertrude suddenly picked up her pace as if to say to her rider “See? I’m still useful. Please don’t feed me to that monster.”

The beginnings of a smile with a wry tinge birthed at the corners of Eugenie’s lips, however, they were cut short by the sudden lurch of the cart forward that almost tipped her off it. If she hadn’t such tight grip on Gertrude’s lead, Eugenie guessed with the sudden speed her horse galloped through the marsh and onto grassland, she would have been thrown from her seat and trampled underneath the wooden wheels.

For a breath and a half, Gertrude strode as quickly as Eugenie had ever seen her run. Over rotting logs draped with curtains of damp moss and big stones jutting out from the earth to pepper the path with obstacles. Through humid bogs humming with a cacophony of congregating insects.

Breaths escaped Gertrude’s nostrils in audible huffs and puffs, accompanied by the beasty’s angered growls and Eugenie’s panicked yet gleeful shouts every time their cart rolled off of an incline and spent more time soaring through the air than gliding across the ground.

She hadn’t the foggiest idea if the threat of being consumed by a night creature was truly what had inspired her long-suffering steed into action, and Eugenie hardly cared. Something or the other called to her horse, and Gertrude had answered with such passionate conviction, there was no stopping her now. Eugenie could only pray that the call emanated from the grounds of the Belmont estate. And her prayers were answered.

Gertrude burst out of a gap in the forest onto a flat plain of land glittering orange by the light of the rising sun, and ran for a minute more until she abruptly stopped by a wrought iron fence. Still panting, she bent her head as far as her lead would allow her to munch happily on a coppice of dried grass growing in clumps at the base of the fence.

She had ended her sprint as abruptly as she had begun it, and the forward momentum was so great, Eugenie slid to the edge of her seat and nearly dropped to the ground on her arse.

Had she enough time, she would have been cross enough with Gertrude to give her a good telling-off. But things as they were, Eugenie had barely enough time to catch her breath, and barely enough presence of mind to even remember how to do that. Her gaze was glued not the ruins of a great estate alongside whose fence Gertrude grazed, but at the looming castle just to the side of it, silhouetted against the sun.

Its jagged edges and pointed turrets made for an interesting shadow that covered Eugenie, her horse and cart, and most of the Belmont Manor. Overhead, vultures and crows circled the sky before perching on the roofs of different spires and the handrails of stairways joining two separate towers. Their caws and fluttering wings a disturbing score to follow the morning sunshine. Though even their ominous music and sight could not win the day as the most upsetting element about the great castle.

Its elaborately ornate double doors, far taller and wider than Eugenie thought they needed to be, were slightly ajar, and that gave her cause for concern. Although that hadn’t been the thing to catapult her into a state of fear. No, that was the pair of what at some point had to have been human beings at the base of the steps that led to those doors.

They were decayed beyond belief; strips of dead skin looking as thin as cobweb hanging off bone bleached white by the sun in blackened, dry strips. Knots of stringy, oily-looking hair stuck to the naked skulls in random veils, and both bodies wore tattered, beaten dresses—perhaps, nightgowns, once upon a time—hanging in shred from exposed collarbones and shoulders.

The bodies also hung in the air from the long spikes they were impaled upon, the pointed end of the rod jutting out from under the upper teeth of their skulls. Their lower mandibles had long since detached from their skulls and dropped to the ground beneath their bodies.

Eugenie had heard stories. She had heard tales of the castle that had, unexpectedly and suddenly, made its home beside the Belmont remains months ago, and hadn’t moved since, as it was fabled to do.

She had heard from too many mouths and been the recipient of too many worried stares to not believe them, but stubbornness and a stupid optimistic hope that it wouldn’t be true took a broom and swept those stories and those tales under a rug, to be dealt with later.

She had simply refused to believe that her luck could be that awful. That the final obstacle in her path toward the repository under the Belmont Manor, toward her path to helping her sister, could be the worst possible, conceivable threat: Dracula himself.

But there was no denying it now. The deaf ears Eugenie had turned to the truth rang with death knells so loud, they were all she could hear.

The absence of substantial animal life in the surrounding woods should have been her final warning. Animals were repelled by his being, and they had fled for their lives as a result, leaving only the insects, reptiles and amphibians. Cold-blooded creatures much like him.

No villages around for so many miles? Not even drifters? Curious until one considered no one wanted to be livestock for the vilest being in surely all of history.

The vultures would go wherever death was sure to follow, and the crows would accompany to announce their approach.

The impaled bodies at the steps were evidence of his habitation. Evidence of her likely fate were she to remain on those grounds.

Eugenie would do well to snap her reins, draw her horse back to attention and ride back through that gap in the forest. She would do even better to abandon the cart all together, ditch the dead weight, jump on Gertrude’s back and speed away.

In another life, perhaps Eugenie does just that. Turn away and leave. Find another way to help her sister. In another life, perhaps, she succeeds. Or, perhaps, she fails, and her sister remains a demon of the night forever. The chance of the latter coming to pass rang even louder in Eugenie’s ears than the bells announcing her incoming demise.

Was there anything more worth dying over?

“We’re in trouble, darling.” She stuck a trembling finger into the curtain shielding her sister from the world, pulled it back and locked gazes in the darkness with the creature tied to the bed of the cart with tightly wound cords of silver. Wherever the beast strained against its binds, the sizzling of burning skin sounded, closely followed by its stinging stench. Eugenie fought the urge to weep as she stared into what used to be her sister’s eyes. “I intend to fight our way out of it if I have to. Hopefully I won’t, though.”

Although Eugenie had lost the element of surprise when Gertrude had so conspicuously placed them almost in front of Dracula’s castle, that dumb horse, she was yet to be greeted by their ever so welcoming host.

In fact, except for the crows and the vultures and the grasshoppers in the copses, Eugenie hadn’t been met with much of anything. No resistance in the way of fences bordering the forest. Though, she thought, maybe Dracula intended the sight of his castle and the impaled bodies of likely his last trespassers to be resistance enough.

“Very effective methods of instilling fear, if I might add,” Eugenie muttered as she disembarked from the cart, dropping to her booted feet on the ground and kicking up a cloud of dirt.

With one hand, she felt along the cart as she walked, keeping her eyes on the castle, and with the other, she fisted the handle of her sickle from where it hung from the belt at her hip. The second her fingertips grazed the cool leather, magick shot through her nails, into her hand, up her arm. She was as ready as one could be. “But if I’m still here, how effective can they really be?”

“Perhaps, you are just a fool.”

Eugenie felt the hit before she could even understand that the answering voice had not and could not have come from Gertrude.

It was a simple backhanded slap on the back that swept her up into the air. She was airborne for a breath—her cloak and skirt flapping around her like the wings of an ungainly chick attempting its first flight—then she came down hard on her knees and rolled and rolled over the earth before coming to a painful halt at the foot of a dry fountain. Her back slammed into the concrete finish of the fountain lip, the abrupt stop forcing her teeth to clack together, just missing her tongue.

Pain flourished in at least a dozen places over her body. Scrapes dotted her face and exposed arms. Bruises already blossoming on her back, at the origin of the hit. And cramps in the fingers of her left hand, the hand that still gripped the handle of that sickle for all it was worth. For to let it go would be to offer her arse on a platter for impalement.

Eugenie groaned and writhed in anguish, clutching at her roiling stomach and staining her clothes in the muddy dirt. She dry heaved to the side, spewing bile in slimy strings. Her head swam, her back ached, and her hands trembled. But she held on to that sickle, her instrument of casting.

The ground crunched underweight somewhere ahead of her; footsteps. Rapidly approaching. Eugenie struggled to sit up, eyes rolling, fear trickling down her spine, a drop of ice-cold water.

“You’ve come upon me at the right time, though,” the voice said to her. Much closer now. Eugenie abandoned her stomach and closed her right hand on the handle of the sickle, above her left. She brought its blade where it curved inward close to her face, flattening her arms to her chest. She closed her eyes. The voice sighed heavily, as if all her dramatics were just that: dramatics. “I haven’t yet had breakfast and I am in no mood to postpone it any longer. Your death shall be quick, so as to allow me to continue my preparations.”

Her nose touched the weapon just above the D-guard, and she focused on it. Turned every sense in her body to the blade. Every ache, every cut. Cool metal slowly warmed under her grip. Through her closed eyelids, she could see the glow of her magick begin to light her blade in a green fire.

The voice hummed. “This is new,” it said. “I don’t like it. Stop it at once.”

The being used the same inhuman speed as when it had first confronted her by her cart again, but this time, she was charged with magick. As if a shroud of lethargy settled on the courtyard, Eugenie moved with a speed just as inhuman, and sliced in an overhead downward arc with her sickle.

From where she had cut into reality and leaked her magick in, a forcefield erupted from the wound and enclosed her. She opened her eyes just to see the owner of the voice slam against the shield and bounce off with a groan. 

He landed on the ground as ungainly as she had when he had thrown her, though he wasn’t down for long. He came from almost every direction, slamming against her shield with more and more force, and groaning even louder every time that same force was redirected back and him and sent him flying.

It was an intermediate version of a simply shielding spell all beginner necromancers were taught. Fire-based, the shield would remain so long as the flame of its caster burned. Its caster could maintain the flame on their weapon for a whole day if they had the life energy to sustain it. If its caster was well-rested and had a full belly.

Eugenie was neither well-rested nor did she have a full belly. She maintained the spell through sheer force of will alone, force of will that she felt would soon give out. Then she would have only succeeded in forcing her would-be murderer away from his breakfast for longer than he wanted, effectively drawing out her death.

Something’s got to give.

He came at her shield again with a spinning kick that had Eugenie’s head rocking back. He flew off into the forest and emerged half a second later with a pulled back fist.

Bang! Thwack! Crunch!

Again and again and again and again—

“Enough of this!” The man screamed, slamming his fists against a rounded curve of the shield. He stared through the translucent casing and locked eyes with Eugenie on her knees, still gripping her sickle to her chest.

He bared his teeth to snarl at her, his elongated upper canines clicking against his bottom teeth. Spittle hung in strings around his teeth and some of it dripped down his bottom lip. Bloodshot eyes encasing slit pupils in amber irises raked over Eugenie’s ragged form, and his eyes narrowed, upper lip curling in a sneer, as if she were the most horrid sight he’d ever had the displeasure of seeing. She could say the same about him.

His hair, oh, his hair…it must have been lovely once. Now, however, the state of it reminded her of the impaled corpses at his front steps. He wore no shirt and whatever inch of the pale skin of his torso that wasn’t covered in dirt and scars was covered in dried blood, caked in flaky bits to his skin. His black breeches were similarly soiled with muck.

He looked the picture of death, reanimated and still kicking. Eugenie drank in his countenance and the wash of fear she’d initially felt was swallowed by overwhelming pity. Seeing him reminded her of when she had returned to that village and seen her sister, her beast, reduced to less than a creature, more of a nameless thing.

Eugenie gazed at him as he swung his fists into her shield, grunting with the effort, sweat and spit pouring off of him. Surely this could not be the Dracula. This was barely a person, talk less of the Devil incarnate vampire.

“Sir,” she couldn’t help but ask. “Are you…well?”

This gave the man a pause so comical, Eugenie might have had the audacity to laugh at it were she not at death’s door . He stopped with a clenched fist high above his head, about to deal another blow that would have either sent him flying again or done away with the vestiges of her strength for good.

His mouth trembled once. He blinked and swallowed, eyes darting from her face to the ground, to the side. Then he scowled a terrible scowl. “Worry not for me, wench! Not while your life hangs in the balance. Enough of this, I say. Remove this accursed shield!”

“You’ll kill me if I do that.”

“Yes! I will!”

“Why?”

“Wh-what? Why? Why?” He sputtered. “You are trespassing on my property. The penalty for which is death. Immediate and expedient.”

“In fact, I trespassed on Belmont property, not whatever land you have claimed as your own. If anything, you are not supposed to be here. Sure, the Belmonts also showed animosity to necromancers in the past, so I should also not be here, but it’s no secret they absolutely loathed vampires. If anyone is trespassing, it is certainly you.”

“No!” His roar was so loud, the veins in his neck strained against his skin. Eugenie swayed on her knees but kept her hold on her sickle. Just keep him talking, just keep him talking. “The Belmont estate was bequeathed to me by the last living son of Belmont. I am the guardian of this place. You. Are. Trespassing.”

Eugenie narrowed her eyes. “You’d have me believe a family most famous for their undying hatred for vampires gave guardianship of their home and fortress to Dracula?”

All at once, the fight left him.

His shoulders sagged. His fists unfurled. His hair fell in greasy waves to cover his face as he rested his forehead against the shield. His next words were so silent, Eugenie wouldn’t have heard them if she hadn’t stopped her breathing in shock, watching him deflate so completely.

“I am not Dracula,” he said. “Please.”

Please?

A pang rocked Eugenie. Her stomach clenched, her vision glazed over for a moment. She was running out of energy.

“I’m sorry for mistaking you, then. What is your name, sir?”

He didn’t answer her. He only raised his head to gaze at her with one unblinking eye. More sad than angry.

“I’m Eugenie,” she said. “Just Eugenie. I didn’t mean to trespass on your property, sir. It’s just, I’ve come a long way to find this place. To find the library of knowledge that is rumored to be under these ruins. All I want is to learn from them and find a way to turn my sister back to normal.”

“Your…sister…?”

“The night creature in my wagon. It used to be my sister.”

Silence.

“Please, sir. She’s all I have left. If I lose her, I’ll be all alone in this world.” Her sentence ended in a hoarse note, her throat hot and thick. Tears flowed from her eyes. “I fear if that were to happen, I would not survive the heartbreak.”

The man slid down the shield until his posture matched Eugenie’s; sat back on his knees, back hunched. He stared at her with that one, unblinking eye. Roving across her entire being, yet remaining on her eyes alone. Just a minute ago, he’d salivated at the thought of killing her. Now, he watched her as though she was the most interesting thing to behold in the entire courtyard.

“Please, sir, I beg of you,” she said. “Please.”

“You will stay in the Hold. You will not venture out of it unless you plan to leave this place forever.”

Relief washed over her and she wept even harder, barely managing to bite out, “Yes, yes!”

“Do I have your word you will remain in the Hold?”

“You do! Do I have your word you will not attack me if I remain in the Hold?”

“You do. You may make use of the Hold. It may not be what Trevor would want, but I feel Sypha, ever the scholar, would bully him into allowing you access.”

She had no clue who Trevor or Sypha were, and she did not care. As soon as she heard those words, Eugenie let go of her sickle and fell forward to the ground on her face. She was out before she hit the dirt.


	2. 2

By the time Eugenie stirred from her spontaneous slumber, night had befallen the courtyard. The light borrowed from the full moon cresting high overhead cast the environment in haunting shade of greys and dark blues. Crickets chirped a clamorous tune, every so often interrupted by the deep belch of a toad.

These were little background noises one would only notice in the absence of really any other sounds, but they might as well have been the fanfare for the Archbishop’s arrival to a small, eager town to Eugenie.

Every chirp was the crashing together of great brass cymbals, every ribbit the horrendously off-tune harmonization of a hastily-assembled choir. And it all sounded as though the parade raged right on top of her cheek, giving her left ear easy and unsolicited access to the festivities.

Thankfully, her right ear was spared, and only because it lay crushed between the weight of her head and the unforgiving ground. Like her right ear and right cheek, her stomach and legs had too become quite acquainted with the ground, and the termites and beetles seemed to think so as well.

They marched in intersecting paths over her body to continue their journey on the ground on the opposite side of her, getting on through her right leg and making a stop somewhere around her left hip. The ones that weren’t savvy enough to avoid the thicker creases in her cloak and skirt got all twisted up in the fabric, tossing and turning, searching for a hole to crawl out of.

Eugenie took a steadying breath. Just the one, before she so heroically freed those trapped bugs and all their friends.

Standing so quickly after being immobile for what she deduced must have been hours did no wonders at all for her already spinning head. Shaking herself about once she got on her feet, trying to wring her clothes and shake her cropped kinky hair of all things insectan twice damned her.

Sure, she succeeded in freeing herself of their creeping legs and antennae. But she also managed to free herself of what little sustenance remained in her already empty stomach.

Eugenie pushed the muddied hem of her cloak to the side, bent at the waist and wretched into the grass. She spat out burning streams of yellow and saliva, grinding out bone-shaking coughs to boot.

When she was done, she nearly collapsed back onto the ground, still bent, stepping—almost running—this way and that like a drunken fool just trying to stay upright. Should her head touch a flat surface again, she’d be out for a second time, and with no food or drink in her belly despite her second round of vomiting, she was not certain that sleep would be from one she would ever wake.

Vision already impaired by the subpar lighting, her eyes then doubled up on their uselessness by crossing the separate images of the world they received, feeding her mind back total nonsense. The hand she waved in front of her face sported ten fingers instead of five. Fourteen, if she moved it too quickly. All this stumbling would soon end in her falling again, then falling asleep in the Lord, she knew. Her hands needed to rest on something that would support it, anything.

Eugenie looked up sharply, then groaned, thereupon regretting it. “Gertrude! Girl! Do you still live?” She glanced over her shoulder, tensing as she did—and as if she could see anything anyway—before sighing at herself.

The voice, gruff and grating, the voice she would imagine erupting from the throat of an avid chain-smoker, had come from her. Eugenie brought a hand to her throat and kept it there.

An answering neigh and the sound of a thumping tail somewhere to her left. She breathed a laugh and began to stumble in the vague direction of the noise, her sight hazy at best. “He hasn’t killed you, then? How curious.”

She’d knocked a foot into something hard in all her stumbling. Dipping a groping hand down, her fingers closed around the leather-wrapped handle of her sickle. She yanked it into her arms, the chilled metal of the blade’s edge biting at her shoulder, but never cutting. And it never would. It knew its master by touch alone.

“What’s more curious, I think,” she said. “Is that I’m not dead either. It seems to me my welcoming party of one had more than ample enough time to kill me as he so wished when I unexpectedly caught a wink in the middle of a negotiation for my life. He even left my sickle.”

Neigh.

“Aye. A curious action—or, I suppose, inaction—if I ever saw one. Neigh for me one more time?”

Neigh.

Her arm, stretched out in investigation, recoiled into her body at a slight disturbance in the air, then bumped into something damp, solid. Eugenie grinned. “Good horse.”

A secondary investigation with her hand proved the something to be wood. Wood hammered into the very specific shape of a carriage cart, the very same one she’d ridden onto the estate earlier that day.

The tarp over the cart bed bounced under her pats: still tightly drawn. It was only as she touched the veil separating the contents of the cart from the eyes of the outside world that concern shot through Eugenie, a bolt of lightning straight from the sky.

She remembered the man that had attacked her as being in a state of disarray. As shaggy and unwashed as she—even more so. She also remembered in those gold-flecked amber eyes of his swam intelligence as well as sadness and fury. It didn’t take a scholar to come to the conclusion that the thing in the bed of her cart was at present the most important thing in her life. She’d told him as much when he had her dead to rights and she was pleading for her life.

He didn’t have to touch her to kill her. He simply had to direct those nasty looking claws of his to the creature behind that tarp.

Others had tried similarly. When she’d stayed in a town for too long, forgotten herself. Strayed a little too far away from her cart and a snooping townsfolk wanted to see what the new drifter had brought into their town.

All thoughts of tiredness thrown to the dogs, Eugenie felt around the side of the cart until she reached the front. Her limbs went all over as she scrambled up the low step onto the seat. Her sickle clattered to the floor of the seat. So unbalanced were her movements, the cart rocked, and Gertrude still attached by the reins huffed and puffed in protest. Her complaints, however, fell on ears never unlistening than in that moment.

Eugenie dragged her arm over her eyes, begging for even the slightest give in the fog clouding up her vision. The hands she peeked through the slit in the veil with shook so violently, it traveled up her arm to her shoulder, and soon enough the rest of her wobbled in fear.

With bated breath, she drew apart the curtains and looked inside, opening her eyes as wide as she could as if that would clear her swimming view.

She’d barely been able to see her own hand in front of her face, but Eugenie saw those two red eyes as clear as day. Unblinking. Ever-staring. Narrowed.

Hungry.

Never before had she been so happy to be met with the gaze of a creature that so clearly thirsted to lap at her innards.

She let out a sigh of relief through her nose, breathed in once the sigh was over, and gagged at the stench. Even more foul this night. Eugenie withdrew, closing the flaps and scrunching her nose. “You have a smell that precedes you so, I should have known you were still in there just by walking past the cart!”

A deep, throaty moan that ended in wet clicking sounds from a cross between a bear, a crocodile, and a wolf, sounded out from behind the curtain, as if taking the bait of her teasing and spewing back mock-scathing retorts of its own. Eugenie righted herself on the seat, giving her beast her back, and ran her hands down her face, grinning still.

“Mm… yes, I know I’m one to talk.” She rubbed her hands over the gooseflesh erupting over the skin of her arms. “It really is so good to find you safe, sister.”

Good to find her sister as alive and grumpy and Gertrude. Even better to find her secured still by her silver binds, and not wandering across the courtyard, leaving behind a trail of carnage, as was the night creature staple.

A simple feel of the power of the magick of the binds advised Eugenie to wait and renew her strength before she renewed its own. Her life energy-based necromancy called for her to operate at optimum capacity before she cast the spells that were known to take a toll on the human body. Trying to do so much as conjure up a spark to start a fire on as empty a stomach as hers, and she wouldn’t be needing the flame anymore, because she’d be dead.

There were so many things she needed: food, water, energy, awareness of her surroundings. The first two would surely give her the third. It would also restore to her the ability to use her magick and defend herself should her mysterious landlord reappear from his hiding place, renewed in his desire to rend her limb from limb.

For she remained on the surface when the express conclusion of their negotiation was that her safety was assured as long as she stayed down below, in the Hold.

She couldn’t even locate the Hold in her current state of disorientation. Disorientation that would be cured by the fourth necessity. An awareness of her surroundings she was unsure she could obtain without proper rest.

These eyes of hers loathed to stay open. Her legs protested further movement. Eugenie doubted anything less than sleep would set her lost senses to rights.

“First, something to eat. Then rest,” she said, reaching a hand down to feel the bottom of the seat for the dingy old knapsack she stashed there.

She’d lifted the bag off one of the many roadside vagrants she encounter and filled it with an emergency supply in the last village she came upon before reaching the estate. Her bounty included hard bread rolls, slices of dried apples, a single orange, and a water skin.

The bread rolls smelt of mold in patches; she quickly ripped them away, salvaging what she could. The thin, dried slices were near invisible now; she gave those to Gertrude, but kept the orange. The water skin was light in her grip; if she could have maneuvered her tongue to fit through the neck of the container and get at every last drop, she would have.

The meal was meager and most of it had missed her mouthful of chattering teeth and fell to the ground from quivering hands. Undoubtedly, her beast was twice as hungry and Gertrude breathed the breath of an animal in desperate need of something to thirst her quench.

With her rations now thoroughly depleted, Eugenie would rejoin their ranks of the starving and the thirsting sooner rather than later.

But these were problems to be worried over in the light of the day, under the glare of the sun. By another version of herself, one who’d had something to eat and who would get a full night’s rest for the first time in almost half a year.

Eugenie undid the silver clasp holding her cloak together at her breastbone and spread it out over herself as she laid out her side on the seat. Though she shivered terribly, she was asleep as soon as she rested her head on her palms, and was awake as soon as the hairs on the back of her neck stood at attention. They only ever did that when she was otherwise occupied, and her body had run out of other ways to let her know she may very well be in danger.

Other outside warnings came in the form of her beast’s growlings and strainings against her bonds. Louder than they’d ever been, even when that prying townsperson had stuck their head in through the curtains. Louder perhaps because even Beasty, as reduced as she was, knew the worst that townsperson could do was scream and draw a crowd. The worst this sudden visitor could do remained to be seen.

Eugenie recalled in a faraway manner the night before. Specifically, two instances.

The first, when she’d turned around looking for the source of her own voice, so surprised that something sounding like that could ever come from her. When she’d tensed just before she glanced around with unseeing eyes.

Her arm sticking out to feel around her with fingers drawn inward, the second. A disturbance in the air, odd-feeling, like rustling wind on an otherwise settled night, had had her pulling her arm back for a moment.

Instances of her body even then, though tired and depleted, trying to warn her of a situation bearing the colour of danger. Muscle memory developed from years living with magickfolk, people who were trained in the art of inflicting hurt with naught more than a flicked wrist or whispered word.

Someone had been somewhere watching her struggle last night. Perhaps even stayed to watch her sleep. And they returned in the morning, close enough that she could feel their stare boring holes into the top of her head.

The handle of her sickle found its way into her waiting palm before she’d even opened her eyes, a lick of green fire birthing at its guard before traveling the length of the curved outer edge.

Her still spinning head told her to take it easy as she pushed herself into a sitting position with a hand and brought her sickle to her chest, ready to push every ounce of her intent into that blade and slice out an inferno that may consume the cart as well as her mystery watcher.

He stood to the side of her cart, hands clasped behind his back, looking much like he did during their first encounter the morning before.

Once flaxen hair as sullied as she remembered it last in loose waves and knotted masses around his neck and shoulders, the part down the middle of it barely visible through a rat’s nest of tangled strands. Bare chested, scarred, blood-stained. His breeches sported the same smears of dirtiness, and the edges of his boot bottoms were crusted with the same layer of dried mud.

The only facet of his appearance that gave Eugenie pause was his eyes. The awareness in them that wasn’t present yesterday, when he had attacked her.

Yesterday, he had been a monster, having a single moment of clarity toward the end of their confrontation. Today, however, he regarded her with a storm of emotions in his gaze raging so furiously and alternating so swiftly, she could scarcely catch sight of them long enough to identify them. As if he took great pains to appear measured to her, even though his shifting eyes belayed the true tempestuous state of his mind.

Eugenie had never seen a back straighter, a mouth firmer. When he wasn’t scowling and sneering and baring his teeth, his lips were full, dry and chapped.

In conjunction with his straight, almost hooked nose and stormy eyes, his face took on a severe, serious look. One befitting a man of much higher caliber. A man one would find in the throneroom of a grand castle, garbed in the finest of silks and linens. A man that would sooner cut his own throat than ever let his appearance deteriorate into one consistent with vagabondage.

This man before her was no rabid creature with only a mind set for opening her veins. The way he stood in the face of her possible attack let her know he had seen works far more dangerous than hers.

Only slightly cowed, Eugenie willed the flame to fade and consequently, her sickle lost its edge of fire. Still, she held it in her hands as the man who was not Dracula continued in his unabashed ogling.

He could stare all he liked, so long as he didn’t try to harm her. The little scraps she’d had for dinner the night before wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a newborn, speak less of a magician on the defensive. If he tried to kill her now, that would be a fight of which he’d be the victor.

And he had reason to try to kill her, she knew. He’d found her up here, like she promised she wouldn’t be.

‘Well,’ she thought. ‘Now’s as good a time as any to renegotiate the terms of this shoddily constructed agreement. Let’s see if I can do it before he relieves me of my head and acquaints my backside with a spear.’

“You are above ground,” he said. His voice, a lowly whispered thing barely resembling the harsh growls and slapping syllables of the previous morning. Eugenie’s heart shot into her dry throat, and she had to swallow thrice to get it back down.

She said, “You always knew that I was.”

He blinked and tipped his head back, like her words had come as a shock to him. They’d come as a shock to her, too. Seated up in the cart, Eugenie looked down at him and hoped he’s pass off her quaking as a result of the early morning’s chilling draft.

“Did I?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. “You did. You’ve been watching me all this time, since last night. Deny it.”

He looked away then. When he met her gaze again, it was her turn to rear back. He looked…worried.

“I admit that I was…keeping an eye on you.” He broke off into a whisper, creases appearing on his forehead and around his mouth. “I could not help myself, try as I might. Try as I did. I just…

“No, I was justified. I am justified. I had reason. I couldn’t simply leave you to your own devices to run amok in a property that doesn’t belong to you. I had to make certain that you would not cause damage to the books in that repository. Imagine my surprise at discovering you haven’t even stepped foot in it. That you have neglected to uphold your side of our agreement.”

“My side required me to remain in the repository for good, until the time of my departure. That is unfair.”

He cocked his head to the side. “That is what you agreed to.”

“I was not in a right state of mind!” Eugenie palmed her forehead, grimacing. “If I had been, I would have told you how unrealistic the things you asked of me were. I’m different from you; I’m a human. I need food and water to survive, neither of which I assume would be constantly available to me down in that hold. As I need food and water, so do my sister and my horse. I can’t get either for us if I’m stuck down there.”

“You can’t get food or water anyway. There are no villages around this area for miles.” Crossing his lean arms over his chest, he stepped away from the side of the cart to circle toward the front, to where Gertrude stood, bending her head to munch on a bit a grass by the iron fence. He began to fiddle with her reins, undoing loops and buckles, all the while never taking his eyes off Eugenie.

The prolonged eye contact rattled her, as did her beast growling, much lower now that Eugenie had acknowledged the foreign presence in their midst. She cleared her throat, squaring her shoulders, and prepared to roll the dice for a second time.

“It was faint, but I heard running water on the ride here. I could always go and fetch some. That takes care of water.”

“There are little to no animals in the forest. Nothing to hunt.”

“I’d bet both my cart and my horse there are fish in that running water. You’d need there to be fish in that water almost as much as I would.”

“Really?” The man rose one blond brow at her, his lips quirking to the side. The teasing gesture looking so foreign on a face that seemed made for severity, it sent Eugenie reeling. “You presume to tell me what I’d need?”

His little smile had flashed a bit of his teeth. That long, pointed canine left Eugenie’s equally teasing remark in the middle of death throes in her throat. What in all the realms was she doing, verbally sparring with a vampire? Baiting him into argument as she would a familiar colleague?

He had said to her he wasn’t Dracula, even expressing sorrow at being addressed as such. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, he was in possession of Dracula’s castle. Eugenie didn’t think this strange man had acquired it in a game of cards. And the way he’d attacked her yesterday? All rage, all power, all danger.

With their old contract seemingly null and void, she should be trying to broker a new one. After all, she needed him and he did not at all need her. He alluded so forcefully to the apparent uninhabitably of the place, it couldn’t be a secret that though he had agreed to let her stay before, he did not want her around.

She had to get him to let her stay, and she could do that by proving useful to him in some way or the other. Not poking fun at him with a stick and waiting to see if he’d bite her hand.

“I—I’m only…it’s just that, um.” Wiping the cold sweat that had broken out on her upper lip and forehead, she stopped to collect herself. At the change of her tone and posture, it seemed, the smile left the man’s lips. As soon as he freed Gertrude from her reins, he crossed his arms and regarded her with the same cold stare as before. She only sweated more. “As you’ve said, there are no nearby villages for miles.”

“As I have said. What’s this got to do with my need for fish?”

“It’s more your need for blood than fish.”

He did not say anything, would not say anything. If he could heart the pounding of her heart in her chest, he gave no outward sign at the sound of its increase. She continued, “No villages mean no blood. You’re a vampire. I know your kind can consume human food, but I also know you require blood to supplement those meals. Where are you getting your blood from if not the fish in those rivers?”

“I’m fast on my feet, as you know. Who is to say I do not go into villages, despite how far away they are, and ravage their population every so often?”

“I’ve been to most of those villages. They all warned me about the castle in this clearing. Not so much about the man that lives in it,” she said. “In-in fact, I haven’t heard a thing about you at all. Almost like no one knows who you are.”

His foot moved to the right and he launched into a pace around her cart, circling her. Silent as the grave. Watching with hawk-like focus. Moving like a predator closing in for the kill.

“If you’re not feeding on humans, you must be feeding on something. You said there are no animals in the forest. There must be fish in the river.

“But-but, now that I-I’m here…”

“Now that you’re here…?” He flicked his hand as if to encourage her to continue, then he disappeared out of her line of sight behind the cart.

“You don’t have to feed on fish,” she spat out, clenching her fists. “Perhaps…perhaps, we can come to some kind of…new agreement.”

The sounds of his creeping footsteps had long since stopped next to the cart, next to where she sat high up from the ground. The man stood nearly an arm’s length away from her now, and he looked up at her with an expression that could only spell out complete and utter shock. It was the most expressive she had ever seen him.

Morbid excitement at having been able to trigger such an extreme response from him warred with her fear that he would both take her up on her offer, and he wouldn’t.

Eugenie had never—thank the great ancestors—had the displeasure of being blooded by a vampire. Any time she and her group had ever chanced running into one, they’d always turned tail and run in the opposite direction.

Oh, if they could see her now, offering her blood, her very life essence to a vampire on a platter, and for what? Access to a bunch of books?

For shame, Eugenie. The words echoed in her head, as ignored as Gertrude’s whines of displeasure.

For shame, but also for a good cause. For a reason.

For her sister.

The man had yet to answer her. As shocked as he looked, she was uncertain if he ever even would. She produced her final trump card.

“Along with that, I could offer you, um, additional services. If you’d like, that is?”

That seemed to snap him out of his funk, but only because it appeared to further entice his interest. “Services which include?”

Tears stung her eyes. Fear curled its claws around her shoulders and dug in, in. in. What if he said no?

Oh! But what if he said yes?

“Companionship.”

“Companionship.” His eyes glittered.

“Yes.”

“Companionship…in that sense?”

“In any sense you’d like, sir.”

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped, abruptly turning to walk away behind the cart. Eugenie let out a breath and quickly wiped under her eyes as he disappeared once again.

“What shall I call you then? You never did tell me your name.” He said nothing. Only paced. Had she ruined this negotiation? Great ancestors, what was she to do now? “Do you remember mine? It’s—”

“Eugenie.” She nearly leapt off the seat as he materialized to her left. Her poor heart pounded, and she palmed it with a hand on her chest. The eyes that met hers were warm. “I remember.”

Their gazes met. And held. “How curious,” she mumbled.

“What is?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.” A deep breath swelled in her chest. She held it as she asked, “You’ve said nothing in response to my offers.”

“I admit I am unsure what to say. You’d let me drink from you and have my way with you, all to keep one foot in that repository?”

“I don’t know that I can find the knowledge in those books anywhere else. Whatever I must to keep my access to them, I shall do it.”

He moved in as closely to the seat as he could without climbing up onto it, and Eugenie shifted as much as she could to the opposite edge without falling off of it. Folding his arms on top of each other and bearing down, as if he meant to tip the cart and have her sliding across the seat right into his waiting jaws. “Even bed me?”

She swallowed and bit her lower lip to stop it trembling. In the veiled cart, her beast had gone quiet. Even it must know this question required careful consideration and could not be interrupted by petulant growling and groaning.

Eugenie’s vision blurred, and not from the tiredness. “Yes,” she whispered into the morning air.

He nodded only once.

Then, with a rustle of dust and pollen, he was gone.


	3. 3

It’d be seven days before she saw him again, and in that time, Eugenie worked like a beast of burden.

The early days of the week were all concerned about the Belmont hold, and the state of its entrance and exit. As the rumors had posited, it existed underground thus Eugenie had expected to encounter some kind of enchanted hatch or something of the like on her way to the bunker.

What she hadn’t even thought to expect was a hole blown into the earth, wider, it seemed, than the base of the manor itself.

Looking down the hole, even on a day simply bursting with sunshine, she found it difficult to properly see its bottom, where she believed the true entrance to the repository lied.

Her anxiety concerning traversing the hole only intensified once she spied the contraption built at the lip of it. Some wooden creation with turning, flat-spoked wheels and a form of pulley system that would operate a bed to carry one to and from the depths of the hole.

So peculiar in its appearance it was, Eugenie considered it could be the fruit of the type of magick the Church usually burned people alive at the stake from practicing.

Just looking at the thing, Eugenie had felt more of a desecrator of all things holy than she’d ever had in her eleven years practicing necromancy. Who had even built this thing? The strange man? Not only was he a vampire, but he saw fit to compound on that particular shortcoming by also dabbling in the forbidden arts of “science”?

Indeed none was more displeased at the notion of boarding the structure than Gertrude.

The sun rose on Eugenie trying to lead the stubborn horse and the cart she was meant to pull by her reins toward the wooden gizmo, and by the time to moon crept up into the sky, they’d still been at it. Two days, Eugenie spent yanking and screaming and cursing and begging. Gertrude bucked and whined and kicked and stood her ground; she would not move.

Their relationship was complicated at best. It always had been from the moment Eugenie stole her and her friend, Lazy Louise, rest her soul, from their stables where they slept soundly and peacefully on their owner’s farm. Probably not even work horses, the pair of them. Just some little girl’s pets. Gertrude had never forgiven Eugenie.

In the months they’d been together, Gertrude had done a lot for Eugenie. But it appeared the mare was at her limit. That would make two of them.

Three of them.

All the constant fighting between Genie and her horse hadn’t left her with much time to do anything else. Sure, she took breaks in the day to fetch water, bathe and hunt fish in the streams around the manor and the castle.

Regardless, her hauls were never enough. She always abandoned her hunt hours earlier than she would have liked to return to coaxing Gertrude onto the mechanism. That always left her with little food for sister, and even less for herself.

The former hadn’t appreciated that.

Beasty had given a powerful roar that had shaken the pebbles on the ground, the sparse leaves in the skeleton trees and the bones in Eugenie’s body. Also, Eugenie would wager, the bones in her horse’s.

Gertrude, spurred into action, was suddenly inspired to get a move on, and after much trial and error, they had made their way down the hole and into the repository. And what a repository it was. Once she could see it, that is.

Eugenie had had to use what energy she had amassed over the two days of eating fish and pushing Gertrude to cast synchronized fire spells in all the lanterns across the repository. Her magic had only been strong enough to light a smattering of those lanterns, however, so while one side of the room was bathed in a bright verdant glow, the other remained shrouded in shadows only lifted when she ventured their way with her sickle, lit up like a torch with the same green fire.

The illuminating quality of her light left much to be desired, but the magnificence of the repository was not lost on her.

A sprawling network of steps, bridges and ladders connected at least three separate floors. Floors were packed with books, scrolls and other countless scholarly apparatus as far as the eye could see. Sculptures of religious figures, counters and cases with vials, ampules and bottles, some empty and some containing strangely-coloured liquids.

And every shelf that wasn’t stocked full to bursting with reading materials was stocked full to bursting with tools and implements largely associated with killing.

A collection of armors and ammunition to make even the most hardened monster-hunter clutch their crucifix and quiver in their boots. Creature memorabilia displayed on plaques and hanging from walls, as much a catacomb for the creatures they belonged to as an exhibit for the curious, human eye.

A mantle of rare tomes penned by a philosopher long since passed just adjacent to a showing cabinet furnished with the skulls of vanquished vampires. Truly a place with something for everyone.

One had to navigate several flights of steps to go from the foyer in front of the entrance doors to the ground level of the repository, so dragging Gertrude, her beasty and her cart all the way down there couldn’t be done. Eugenie had chosen to leave them both in the circular room outside of the library. Though, she had let Gertrude off of her reins and let her wander about the room.

Days three, four and five had all been about familiarizing herself with the inner workings of the great library. The Belmonts had had a good filing system in the form of an index book atop a lectern, and Eugenie had made good use of it many times over the course of those days.

From the section of grimoires and codices she figured the Belmonts had not exactly asked for nicely to the section with the polyglots she’d use to translate the languages in those grimoires and codices.

One moment was spent teaching herself a crash course in the Adamic language. All in order to understand a passage in a spellbook whose drawings alluded to the nature of its contents being about something alchemical. The next moment was whiled away transcribing a grimoire written solely in a jargon of esoteric symbols.

She hadn’t even know just how much time had put on its shoes and passed her by until she’d tried to stand up from her sitting position on one of the steps after an especially grueling session with a stubborn passage, and her legs had given out beneath her.

The floors of the repository were hard and unaccommodating, and Eugenie had learned this from one too many falls and twice as many impromptu naps leaning against the side of a shelf. Then she’d snap awake at a moment’s notice and return to her reading with the same swiftness she’d used to leave it.

Many times her horse, her beast, and her empty stomach and her own rank had had to cry out in despair before Eugenie’s attention was wrenched from her latest read. She would renew the charms on her sister’s binds. Gertrude would get to ride out across the plains of the clearing while Eugenie went to fish and have a wash. Her stints at the stream never lasted too long, however, and she’d be back down that hold soon enough.

Her searches for content pertaining to her sister’s predicament more often than not turned up nothing but dust, though she could admit perhaps she was asking too much of the Belmonts, bless their hearts. They had scrolls for days with explicit instructions on the many, many ways to kill a creature of the night, and numerous written accounts of the Belmonts who had killed those creatures in their own little creative way.

She had yet to come across the account of a Belmont who was more interested in reversing the curse of the night creature rather than beheading it with a breadknife and willpower.

The texts she had read about exorcisms provided plainly written steps to perform the act in a myriad of ways, and each of those steps in all of those ways outlined the requirement of a priest ordained in a church. She was neither a priest ordained in a church nor, with the nearest township so far away, did she have access to a priest, so she shelved those texts to be considered another day, if at all ever again.

The spellbooks she perused with the subject matter of transmutation were mostly in languages she could not yet understand. Had she stayed just a few more years and completed her training with the Moving School, perhaps she wouldn’t need to have five different translators open to tackle one book.

Not for the first time, Eugenie felt the pulsating sting of shame settle in the pit of her stomach.

The limitations her stunted education gifted her with knew no bounds, it seemed. Because she had not yet learned how to make them permanent, the enchantments she casted only lasted some hours. Maybe a full day, if she was lucky, but they always had to be renewed, which was why she couldn’t leave her sister out of her sight for more than a day at most.

Because she didn’t yet know how, she was forced to use an anchoring tool, in her case her sickle, as a funnel to focus her magic to a specific point, a specific intention. Master necromancers had no use for anchoring tools and could weave complex incantations with just their hands. Eugenie was barely an intermediate.

Because she had not made it to the class that would teach her how to direct the draw elsewhere, the potency of the spells she cast depended on her life energy. She drew directly from her own body, her own soul. Too big a spell and she’d only succeed in offing herself, a blunder fit only for an untrained beginner, not the likes of her.

Never would she get a chance to prove herself, too. Eugenie had set the bridge connecting her to the Moving School aflame when she’d broken her oaths and left their ranks.

It had been quite some time since she had allowed the dishonor of her previous actions all those months ago entry into her mind. But as she ruminated now on the past and how it had affected her present so, the memories knocked against the side of her skull and she was powerless to deny them passage.

When Master Ahn had first approached her, Eugenie was a young girl of ten summers, lost in the markets. She had looked up into his weather-worn face, bronzed and dotted with sweat from the blazing heat of the afternoon sun and had waited for that animal instinct that children possessed to compel her to run. After all, little boys and littler girls went missing in her little township all that time in the markets. And usually after they had made the mistake of seeking refuge in the tunics of strange adults that had promised to help them locate their parents.

Master Ahn hadn’t been a kidnapper or a deviant, though. He was though a man long in the tooth, a scholar and a practitioner of magick. The sort that she had witnessed several people been accused of and ultimately burned or drowned or stoned for practicing. He had presented Eugenie with quite the offer. One to better herself, to make more out of what up until that point had been an insignificant, painful existence.

She had looked up into the man’s brown face—the first person she had ever seen in her township other than her and her sister to have brown skin. And he didn’t seem to belong to anybody either! How curious!—and had taken it with open arms. Eugenie learned with Master Ahn and all the other lecturers and pupils for eleven years before she ran away, and she had done so in the dead of night, when the possibility of being caught and confronted was less.

When she knew Master Ahn would be fast asleep.

The shame that ravaged her soul whenever she thought back to her faithful teacher, thought back to the disappointment she knew he would feel at her abandoning her studies and leaving the group, and in such a cowardly way…

It was always so great, Eugenie could swear she could taste it on her tongue. But the bitter zest almost always cleared when she remembered why she had left. Who she had left for.

She may have been too late to prevent her sister’s fate, but she’d dedicate her entire being now to reversing it. The work was hard and eternal-seeming, and she would keep at it until all her digging turned up some gold.

Having such work to do wasn’t so bad either. Eugenie hadn’t realized how much she had missed learning, how much she had missed the challenge of mastering a subject or a course.

Having a purpose again after months of having nothing else to do but ride and worry rejuvenated Eugenie and gave her that spunk in her step she didn’t know she’d been missing all this time. It reminded her of being somebody’s pupil again, somebody’s charge. As the days went on, the repository became less and less of a great library and began to take on more of a resemblance to something of a home.

Day six had been a day for her sister. Books forgotten, Eugenie had spent the day seated on the cart and told her sister everything she’d read so far as she fed her sister fish, raw, freshly pulled from the stream. Eugenie had joked with her and sang their little made-up songs, like they used to when they were young and still together on the Heath farm.

Beasty only stared.

After so many days of glee perusing the halls of the repository, on the sixth day, Eugenie remembered sadness. Loss and grief. Worry that her inability to find a solid way to free her sister would result in these emotions being the only ones she would ever feel.

On the morning of the seventh day, Eugenie would remember fear.

That day, she had changed out of her usual uniform of her cloak, boots, long tunic, slitted skirt and leggings. Opting instead to wear a simple brown, knee-length tunic and comfortable leather slippers as she intended to give the aforementioned clothes a good wash as well as scour the forest for something other than fish to munch on.

Although the raw flesh sated her beast well and good, concern niggled at her continued consumption of such an unbalanced diet.

The last time she’d visited the stream, a patch of mushrooms growing beside a rotting log had caught her eye. But too excited to return and continue reading her book on different potions, she hadn’t investigated it. An oversight she well intended to remedy that day.

Fetching her water pail from its usual place under the seat of her cart, she prepared for her journey to the surface. Her cloth knapsack lay spread out on one of the still upright railing of the lowest flight of steps, still a bit damp from its last go at the task of carrying the fish back from the stream.

Picking it up disturbed the smell and the stench of raw fish backhanded Eugenie across the face. She coughed, the insides of her nostrils stinging, as she slung its strap around her shoulder. With an eager Gertrude by her side, Eugenie boarded the contraption and kicked it into gear, humming an old tune as she ascended up the hole.

She had only just crested the lip of the hole when her body tensed. When her shoulders locked and her fingers twitched to her hip, searching for the handle of the sickle she had forgotten to carry.

The last few days had been so uneventful, so full of mundane activities that they had lulled her into a state of laxness. Her guard was so lowered, it lay beneath the floors of the repository. Her guard was so lowered, she had allowed herself to forget the grounds on which she walked back and forth every day didn’t belong to her.

That she shared this stretch of land with another soul. Just because she hadn’t seen him or felt his watching presence since the day he had left her that faithful morning didn’t mean he’d packed his things and left the place to her, wish as she might.

Every day, she walked for a week past his castle to get to the edge of the forest, and every day for a week she kept her head forward, but watched it out of the corner of her eye. Wondering if that was the day he’d reappear. That he’d come to collect his dues.

She had made some outlandish offers when she saw him last, and every night before she lay her head on her cart to sleep, the thought of him taking her up on them after all crossed her mind. His face had been the picture of surprise when she made them, and he’d run away soon after hearing them. But still.

Still.

She should have known for all that, he’d still come. That it wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’. That ‘when’ would be sooner than she’d think.

They’d locked eyes as soon as her head breached the edge of the hole, and they maintained their stare as the mechanism slide higher and higher before stopping. Eugenie wondered which one of them looked more stupid, but wagered it must be her.

His stare played across her face, the pail she had in her left hand, the reins to her horse she had in her right, and the bag that rested on her thigh. He gazed so deeply, she could almost feel the tracks of heat his eyes dug into her skin as he looked her over.

When he met her eyes again, when he caught sight of her slightly parted lips and raised brow, a soft smile graced his lips, his amber eyes bearing the just the littlest spark of delight. Yes, it was she that looked the stupidest. It had to have been.

Where he took in specific parts of her appearance in silence with only tiny changes to his countenance, giving next to nothing away, Eugenie gaped at him, closing and opening her mouth so many times, she reminded herself of the very fish she was on her way to pluck from the water. Even though she was aware of the ridiculousness of her expression, she was powerless to change it. The sight before her eyes was simply too astonishing to warrant any other display.

Her flighty neighbor was gone for so long, it looked like, because he was having the makeover of his life.

His hair! It was blond! His skin had gone up a shade or two now that it was no longer coated in several layers of grime. The sight of his clean chest was one that would be left to her imagination, as he finally had on a shirt, and one that wasn’t slashed to ribbons or moth-eaten to death and back. Same for his black trousers and gleaming boots.

He looked every bit like the haughty aristocrat she had pegged him for during their last conversation. All clean-smelling and clean-looking. He looked like someone that just remembered they were alive.

He looked…great. He obviously knew it, as he tossed tendrils of his flaxen waves over his shoulder, lowering his lashes and puffing out his chest at her staring appraisal.

Eugenie was so occupied trying to reconcile the image of the man that had slobbered and pounded at her shield with the man standing before her now in a white, clean, long-sleeved shirt preening in her unblinking gaze, she almost forgot to be scared. Almost. Then she remembered to remember his sudden appearance here couldn’t possibly spell anything good for her.

She looked away, choosing instead to study her suddenly interesting toenails. Gertrude huffed, the smelly horse breath tickling her neck. The man shifted on his feet, the sound of his clearing throat drawing her attention back to him. She struggled to meet his eyes again, however, and her sweeping gaze only made it to his shirt before she gave up the battle.

By the sides of his thighs, she saw he carried a wooden pail per hand, and one of full of dead fish. Recently dead fish, by the smell. Poking out from the edge of the other were leaves of different shapes and colours. She leaned her head forward and saw spongy-looking masses in drawl shades. Mushrooms! Someone had had quite the eventful morning already.

Pursing her lips, she wondered but said nothing.

“I have come to have my companionship,” he suddenly said. “Come along, now. Leave the horse.”

He turned away and started walking in the direction of his castle as she raised her head, mouth agape. Great ancestors, great ancestors, great ancestors. Companionship? Companionship! She had thought with him being a vampire and all, he’d come first for the blood. But apparently, he was an early riser in more ways than one.

 _Great ancestors, great ancestors, great ancestors!_ The pail clattered out of her hand and started on a roll over the edge of the platform suspended over the hole on which she and Gertrude still stood.

“Shit!” Eugenie exclaimed, grabbing it before it could fall over. She clutched it to her as if pressing the worn wood as tightly as she could against her chest would stop the chaotic beating of the heart that resided within it.

This was what she had offered him, wasn’t it? Companionship, the nature of which was entirely up to him. But the reality of the act hadn’t seemed so…real to her until right then, when he had actually requested it. At least, he had left her alone for some days to regain a bit of her energy, and he’d cleaned himself up too before he came calling. Would this be a recurring thing? She hadn’t specified how many times she’d scratch his itch. Did he expect this every morning? Could she even say no if he did?

“Eugenie?” He called out to her and Eugenie flinched so violently, she almost threw herself and the pail over the edge. Even from where he stopped to call for her at least twenty feet away, she could still spy the flattening of his lips. The lowering of his brows. He’d seen that flinch and didn’t like it. Perhaps he worried she’d be that way in bed, too.

In bed. With him. Her scalp warmed and tightened.

“Coming, si—er, I’m coming, I’m coming,” Eugenie called. Removing Gertrude’s reins became a backbreaking task for her shaking hands, but she got them done and walked to where he waited for her, still holding that pail to her chest. Somewhere behind her, she vaguely heard her horse’s happy neighs. The sound of it was mostly drowned out by her pounding heart.

They continued on their trek to his castle. Every time she slowed her steps, intending to fall behind him so she could have ample time to lose her mind as privately as she could, his strides gradually slowed to match her own. Soon enough, they walked shoulder to shoulder once more, her shoulder brushing his upper arm ever so slightly, her muscles clenching and jaw locking all the while.

More than she’d like, his eyes found either the top of her head or her temple, though he never broke stride. His staring made it more difficult to outwardly fly off the handle, so most of her going mad had to be internalized, resulting in many a tensed muscle and teeth nearly ground to dust.

The silence was almost as smothering as his stare. Eugenie could only do something about one.

“Will I—” she cleared her throat when her voice cracked. “Will I be back before sundown? I’d like to conduct some more research before bed tonight.”

Something about what she said must have amused him because he laughed. A light, airy, musical thing. She quickly snapped him a look of astonishment before she had enough time to convince herself to keep her gaze on her feet and the path before him.

Grooves appeared in his cheeks when he laughed. The imperial set of his eyebrows and thin nose slanted into lopsidedness, reducing the severity of his expression. His shoulders shook, too.

_How curious._

He smiled. “I’d be concerned if you were not. What sort of breakfast takes all day to make?”

Eugenie blinked. “Breakfast? We’re…making breakfast?”

“Maybe also something for lunch, if we’ve got the time after eating.”

“After…eating.”

“Well, we don’t intend to simply stare at the food once it’s made. At least, I don’t. Is that what you do for fun, Eugenie?”

There was that smile at again. And the laugh, after she’d stared at him, gaping again. It was embarrassing, but she stared at him for the rest of the morning, too.

As he’d prepared the fish for roasting with the spices he’d picked. As he’d cut up and washed the mushrooms, consulting a recipe book on just what to do with them as she stood off to the side of the kitchen, watching him as he worked. As he made a show of asking her for tips and tricks concerning the dish, when he knew damn well she’d only respond with more staring.

He laughed a lot. Most of it under his breath and hidden behind the curtain of his hair. She heard each and every single one of them, and where the laughter of other, mainly of people she considered her friends, put her at ease, his laughter only blew more air into the fire under her arse his appearing before her earlier had lit.

The sight of his contentment, so genuine in its expression, set her off kilter. Especially when she remembered the pair of welcoming guests they had walked past on their way up the stairs and into the castle.

Eugenie had watched him walk past the two corpses impaled at the base of his steps, and caught the tightening of his jaw. The purposeful way he had kept his eyes forward and he climbed the stairs, taking them two at a time as if something were hot on his tail. His strained expression had melted soon thereafter, though, giving way to the small smiles and childish chuckles she received from him now that it was just the two of them.

Here was a man that had presumably killed two people and arranged their remains in crude displays so that they were the first thing you encountered when you made for his house, here he was, relaxed. Jovial, almost. Encouraging her with his teasing remarks and joshing to relax as well. Don the jovial coat. Enjoy their little session of companionship.

What scared her was that she longed to do just that, but couldn’t help wondering if his two friends on sticks had done the very same thing. Had they too helped this man cook? Had they sat at his table as she did now, eagerly polishing off the delicious spoils of their cooking war?

She wondered.

She ate, but she wondered while she did.

They dined in their heaviest silence yet. After Eugenie had said nothing to his numerous attempts to coax a response from her, he too had resigned himself to simply eat his fish. Though he glanced up from his plate at her every now and then, eyes flitting across her pale face before dropping.

Scraping forks and clacking teeth were the only sounds for most of their meal. And when there was nothing left on the plate to scrape their forks against and nothing to clack their teeth chewing, they simply sat back in their seats. Silent.

They stayed that way for a good minute before he said, low, monotone, “Have I done something wrong?”

Startled, Eugenie looked at him before glancing away to stare at the window behind his head instead. “Sorry?”

“Should I be the one saying sorry? Have I done something wrong? I must have—you keep doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“You keep—you can’t look at me.” He slapped his hands against his thighs. “What have I done? Things were fine in the kitchen, weren’t they? We had fun. Somewhere between there and here, I must have done something because you can’t look at me, and you won’t talk to me.”

“I don’t…” She sucked her bottom lip between her teeth and lowered her eyes to the table. “I…well…”

“Don’t lie to me, Eugenie. Please.” Propping his forearms on the table, he leaned forward, as if he could stretch the length of the table and appear before her face.

It felt like it, too. Eugenie took a breath and hoped she wasn’t making a grave mistake. “The truth is I’m hesitant to say anything for fear that you’ll not appreciate it and hurt me in retaliation.”

“You can speak freely.” Suddenly exasperated, he lifted his hands and let them slap against his thighs again. At the sound they made connecting with his breeches, her shoulders shook in a wince but once. Out of the edge of her averted vision, she spied the man’s mouth harden.

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

“Truthfully, I am wondering about the corpses in front of your steps,” she said with a measure of difficulty. “I am wondering how they got there. I am wondering if I am in danger of sharing their fate.”

To this, he simply said nothing. That in and of itself told her everything. From some unknown source, she pulled streams of courage into herself and found the gull to continue. “Were they like me? Did you share companionship with them like this? Did you invite them into your home like you’ve invited me to cook with you? Am I like them?”

“That remains to be seen,” he ground out.

“Who were they? What did they do to you to deserve such a fate? You must tell me so that I can avoid it. It’s only fair if you aim to keep making me have breakfast with you.”

“Making you-! I’ve had enough.” His chair scraped against the floor as he stood suddenly. At his sides, his fists clenched. Now, he looked anywhere but at her. “You should leave at once.”

She stood too. “But you must tell me! I don’t want to end up like them, Dying at the hands of a vampire is quite bad enough. But you seem to take things to an extraordinarily violent level. I don’t want to be another decoration for your steps, sir. You must tell me! Please!”

He took a step back into his chair, and it clattered to the floor. “I don’t…I can’t remember it. I simply can’t!” Shoulders shaking, he buried his face in his palms, fingers digging into his hairline.

“Did they hurt you?” Eugenie stepped around the table and took a step toward him, hands out at her sides, beckoning. “How did they hurt you?”

“They…they lied to me.”

“Did they?”

“They used me,” he whispered.

“How awful. I’m so, so sorry.” And she found that she meant it.

The man looked at her then, and in that moment, it wasn’t hard to see him as the animal that had tried to kill her in the courtyard that morning. In that moment, he looked just like he had before he’d tried to pound her shield to bits. Furious. Overwhelmingly sad.

Eugenie reared back. Perhaps she’d gone too far.

“’Sorry?’ ‘ _Sorry?’_ Do not pretend to care about what they did to me. You only want to know so you can satisfy your morbid curiosity. So you can save your own skin!” He advanced on her. For every step she took back, he took two forward until he’d back her into the china cabinet behind the table. His pupils slimmed into slits and his canines elongated to nasty looking, razor-sharp points.

Eugenie trembled under his shadow and said nothing. That was the wrong move.

“Deny it!” He roared in her face and her chest swelled under the pressure of his presence until she burst into tears, pressing a clenched fist into her mouth. She had never experienced such fear in her life. The urge to wet herself grew more and more as he huffed and puffed above her, baring his teeth, eyes wild and bloodshot.

“It’s true,” she sobbed. “P-please, don’t hurt m-me. Please, please, don’t hurt me. Please!”

“You humans! You’re all the same. Selfish, self-serving bastards who do so much evil in the short time you are alive. Leeches, the lot of you. Do you deny you are a leech?”

“No, no. It’s t-true. It’s true.”

“Liars. Deceivers. All you do it take. Destroy!”

“It’s true.”

“I can’t hear you!”

“I-t’s true! It’s t-t-true! Please.” Eugenie tucked her face into her shoulder, gasping and hiccupping, sounding every bit the scared little girl he had reduced her to. She was so hysterical at that point, she could scarcely remember what she was pleading for. “P-please. Please.”

The inquisitiveness had left her then, it seemed hand in hand with his rage. He deflated before her eyes, shoulders dropping. Head lowering. Eyes widening as he looked at her, really looked at her.

She sobbed so deeply, her back hit the face of the cabinet and the plates inside rattled on their display hooks. She only had a single thought in her mind, and it was that of escape. He’d surely kill her now. Surely. She had to run. Make him chase her. Make him work for the kill.

She was dead. Great ancestors, she was dead.

“Eugenie?” The sunlight streaming in through the window washed her face in a warm glow again, and she knew he had backed away from her. This was her chance.

_Run._

Her pail was still somewhere in the kitchen.

_Leave it. Run._

“Eugenie? Eugenie, I—” He tried to reach a hand out for her, and the argument in her mind ground to a startling halt. Eugenie turned on the spot and ran from the castle as fast as she could.


	4. 4

Time moved differently down in the hold.

Eugenie would start off her day of reading by strolling out into the receiving room leading to the repository and looking up the hole at the sky, bright and early and blue. And after what felt like hours of researching and cutting up her fingertips on thin-edged scrolls, she’d reenter the circular room to check again, expecting the cobalt backdrop of night filled with glittering stars. Instead, she would be met with the glare of the midday sun.

Other times, she’d feel like she’d spent no time at all deep in the bowels of the grimoire section of shelves and it’d turn out she’d spent almost a day and a half down there.

Only the spells of fire she’d cast in the lanterns around the library, and their transitoriness, proved to be a trustworthy indicator of the passage of time. They lasted some twenty to twenty-two hours, much like her other spells, and had to be renewed regularly to keep the library illuminated.

Often, Eugenie fell asleep with her nose dipped between the pages of a tome on alchemy and opened her eyes hours later to complete and utter darkness. And she would know it was time to get up and do something other than dry her eyeballs reading sincerely horrifying, first-person narratives of stake burnings, exorcisms and other fun activities for the family.

Notwithstanding, as of late, she’d been having more difficulty separating her days from her nights. Mostly, she stayed awake. Feeling the seductive pull of sleep trying to coax her into laying down her head, and shaking it off as violently as she would a basket of ants poured into her lap had become as regular an occurrence as her green fire winking out on her in the middle of a rigorous bout of investigation.

She could scarcely tell just how long it had been since she had allowed herself to even consider boarding that wooden contraption and going up to the surface just to remember what it looked like. Save to eliminate when the need arose, to see to it that the hold remained unsullied by the excrement of its guests, that is.

Were she asked, Eugenie would make known with the vigor of a theater actor in the thick of an outstanding performance that she only did what she felt was right for her sister’s condition.

Spending the most time out of her days wide awake, alert and researching was what her sister needed from her. The books wouldn’t read themselves, after all, and neither would the cure for her sister’s predicament inexplicably materialize out of thin air.

Additionally, it wasn’t as if much else required her attention. Eugenie had kept enough reserves of roasted fish and culled dry grasses to feed all the mouths that called the hold home. Fetched and kept pails of water in advance for Gertrude while Eugenie sipped from her waterskin whenever the thirst was too great.

Distantly, she was only slightly aware the supply of food would run out at some point. Or that Gertrude’s restlessness at being cooped up in that little room all day and all night would soon enough graduate into more insistent displays. The horse neighed this and that whenever she caught sight of Eugenie stumbling out from the repository in a stupor and into the room to renew the magic of her sister’s binds. Horse-tongue was yet another language Eugenie was not well-versed in, but it wouldn’t take a decoder to understand Gertrude’s thinly-veiled threats.

Eugenie was only slightly aware that the jumbling images of words floating off the pages she read, the way they bled into one another, were manifestations of her complete exhaustion. As well as her reddening eyes and limbs that had to be badgered into operation by her slowly-failing mind. That she would have to close her eyes soon for longer than a blink.

That she couldn’t keep rotating her two pairs of clothes without an opportunity in between to wash them with more than just half a pail of water. That they had both become too filthy to continue donning. That she would soon have to answer her body’s calls to relieve itself properly in the bushes by the stream, as she had done up until her self-imposed exile.

Distantly, she was only slightly aware that the kinks in the armor of her little strategy of evasion would soon be attacking points for the blade of reality.

She would have to go out soon. She would have to confront him.

But stubbornly, and to the detriment of herself, her beast and her horse—and the repository itself, she would soon learn—Eugenie looked upon the many evidences of her oversight and testified with unseeing eyes to perceiving nothing wrong with the way she had handled her affairs thus far. An error that would prove costly the following morning. Night? Who knew?

Not her.

Eugenie only learned she was awake because she knew she had previously been asleep.

The remnants of unconsciousness fought to keep her eyelids glued together, and sent forth commands to keep her extremities dead to the world, resistant to attempts to rouse them into action. The inside of her mouth tasted of the gummy, stagnant air down in the hold, a proof she’d been snoring the sort of snoring that could have only resulted from the sweetest kind of sleep.

To her mortification, a since-dried line of drool painted a streak from the corner of her lips down the side of her face, where it met the cool ground. A dried-up inkwell, quills and rolls of parchment were spread out on the floors around her. Her choice of venue for her impromptu siesta had been the base of a shelf chockful of glass beakers and the embalmed extremities of several invertebrates. Even as her body ached all over from the inconvenience of the place she had picked to nod off in, she’d still awoken refreshed and rejuvenated.

Eugenie had a hard time recalling another moment she felt as stupid as she did then. She had let her body get the best of her in the end! Sleeping when she could be possibly finding the recipe for her sister’s cure?

How incredibly her guilt burned in her chest.

Thankfully, her fire spell held fast and kept the repository as lit as it could. To all appearances, it was one of her only spells that retained while she forgot herself and took a catnap.

She’d been in the process of using the hem of her dress to scrub at the drool on her cheek when the ornate double doors separating the library from the receiving room burst inward in an explosion of wood and dust. Even on the ground floor, Eugenie rocked back onto her heels from the force with which the doors had been blown asunder, and raised her arms over head to shield herself from the oncoming shower of debris.

Eyes formerly swamped with sleep snapped open in a moment’s notice and stayed open, darting to all the corners of the great room in the near darkness for the signs of her assailant’s identity and current location. The very same arms that had protested movement only a breath ago tightened in anticipation of a brawl, going up over her torso and head in a familiar stance of protection. She stepped on a quill jumping up into a stand, snapping the thing in two, and barely noticed.

So, he had finally come for her.

How foolish of her to have thought after the way she had slighted him that day over their breakfast, pestering him on a topic he clearly expressed beforehand he had no desire to wax lyrical about and running away when the going got tough, that he’d simply let bygones be bygones. That he would be content to leave her to her own devices. Neverminding that she owed at least half a day’s session of ‘companionship’, as well as a round of bloodletting, Eugenie had erred. Quite remarkably. After he had invited her into his home for the first time and shared a meal, and many a smile, with her.

Vampires were not known far and wide for their appetites for blood as well as their charmingly forgiving personalities. Nothing short of a retribution of the bloodiest kind should have been what she should have expected to see in the cards.

But surely, he hadn’t any need to cause such damage to the very place he himself had said he was under an obligation to safeguard just to get to her. In the past, the man had had no issue sneaking up on her with that same aberrant agility vampires usually employed on their prey and their enemies alike. If he wanted her head torn from her shoulders, he could undoubtedly do it without even ever waking her. Why burst in the doors and upturn shelves?

A bellow of a roar shook the walls, reverberated through the ground up into the soles of her boots. To her right, to the half of the library her magic could not extend to that was cast in a shroud of black, shelves and stands came sailing into her line of sight, only granting Eugenie a breath to perceive the danger and react to it by ducking out of the way before they smashed into walls behind her. Rubble pelted her head and shoulders, little slicing shards, pieces of it catching in her hair.

All around her, wood crashed into wood. Glass cabinets meant for display tumbled from their hanging places on the walls, shattering in horrible noises against the floor. Stone sculptures sailed over her head, all the while that grating, awful trumpet of a feral howl belted out from every direction and no direction at the same time—a testament to just how quickly the creature moved as it ripped through the repository, from one floor to the next, leaving destruction in its wake.

She had heard that howl in varying volumes and intensities for the months she travelled with its emitter. The moment Eugenie recognized it for what it was, the blood froze in her veins, turning as cold as anything she’d ever felt. Her darting eyes strained against their sockets in an effort to take in as much of the spectacle unfolding before her as she could. Her lower jaw hung in the breeze.

Surely, obviously, certainly, she had not slept for that long. Surely, her body had not betrayed her to that extent?

Eugenie retrieved her senses long enough to turn tail and run out of the valley between two shelves just in time for them to careen into one another. A cloud of torn pages, dust, and splinters of wood rose up into the air. The creature had leapt from the ledge of the second floor’s stairs railing and landed on the shelves Eugenie had been hiding behind. The light of the fires in their lanterns were dim, and as such painted the perfect twilight scene for the thing’s presence. And she could debate its identity no longer.

On its hocked forelimbs and hind limbs, all two pairs of each, if one were subject to the conditions of poor lighting, even poorer eyesight and maybe just a dash of drunkenness, one could mistake it for some canid creature. Perhaps a wolf, if it wasn’t as hairless as it was. In the bone structure of its face and limbs, it had enough of a canid’s anatomical build for a third party to understand at least in a vague sense why the mistake had been made. Right before they turned and ran for the hills, that was.

Its snout alone was almost as long as the length of her upper arm. Its elongated incisors on both its upper and lower mandibles were sights she had seen before as it closed around the throat of her dear Lazy Louise and rent the animal limb from limb. Teeth so long and sharp, it prevented it from closing its mouth completely, and could confidently give the vampire’s a run for its money.

The only thing longer than its teeth were the claws tipping each of those eight feet, and the only thing longer than them was the whipping, muscular tail snapping in the air behind it. A tail that snapped straight to attention as soon as the monster’s glowing red eyes locked on Eugenie’s trembling form.

A maelstrom of emotions swirled in her head, turned her brains to naught but sloshing pulp in her skull. Chief among those emotions was fear, and it both locked her muscles in place, freezing her to the spot, and pleaded with her to do something other than cower and nearly piss herself. Especially when she remembered the tool that would focus her magic, her sickle, lay lost somewhere in the mess of upturned shelves and damaged books the creature currently basked upon.

It lifted its muzzle to give the air a big sniff and with the column of its throat exposed, Eugenie could see on its leathery, mottled black skin a sheen of something that caught in the green firelight. It was splashed across the creature’s maw and left tracks over its chest from where the liquid had run down in streams. The scars from its silver bands ran deep in spiraling patterns over its arms torso and arms, and in those grooves, beads of the fluid dropped crimson onto the books beneath the creature.

Along with her beast’s wrenched signature scent accompanied a coppery smell as pungent as anything.

Blood.

Panic grabbed Eugenie by the back of her neck and gave her a good shake. Her beast had already made a meal of something—and now meant to partake of her own flesh and bone.

Her own sister meant to eat her.

The creature howled a sickening sound full of gurgles and clicks, forcing Eugenie’s hands up over her ears to bar them from the offensive racket. But that had been precisely its plan.

While her hands were busy serving as shields for her ears, it lunged over the shelves for Eugenie with an agility that was hitherto unknown. She opened her previously squeezed-shut eyes in time to spy a black blur sailing in an arc whose destination she could already calculate was her throat, and fought against her baser human instincts. All her sense, even those acquired from years of practicing the mystical arts advised her to cut and run while she could, and with great difficulty, she ignored them all in favor for charging the beast head on.

Time slowed as she used her momentum to propel her into falling to her knees. As she slid on the stone floor under the beast’s vaulting frame. She could almost see the moment when the creature, mid-leap realized its error but also how late it was to correct it. Somewhere during the jump, it must have lost its enviable agility and grace as the music of an incredible crash echoed behind her as she sprinted toward the pile of ruin she knew her sickle to be under.

Perhaps later she would feel the ache of her splitting fingertips as she wrenched books from books and regret the state of them. But in the moment, she had half of her attentions into digging into the base of the hill of books and broken shelf pieces like a woman possessed. The other half of her attentions had one of her ears dedicated solely to the room over her shoulder, trying to separate the noises of her frantic digging from those of the creature rousing from its tumble.

It seemed like ages had passed, civilizations had risen to power and fallen into obscurity, by the time her bloodied fingers brushed against that familiar D-guard. But a particularly ill-placed shelf bit sat on a highly-inconvenient angle in the pile, and kept her from getting enough of a grip on her blade’s handle to yank it out.

“Ancestors, no! No!” Eugenie panted, her biceps straining against her skin. Desperate, she steepled her hands under the shelf, spread her knees and pulled with all her might, plus more.

But she’d spent her years in the Moving School training her mind, not her muscles. And though the work of performing menial tasks like fetching pails of water, tending horses for hours in the hot sun and spearing fish in a river was tough and certainly added some of that toughness to her arms, it wasn’t to the level of hefting a weighty block of wood that sat far taller than she stood.

Her ears now worked to distinguish in addition to all former sounds, her panicked hyperventilating and muttered, manic prayers to all the gods she’d ever known from the mix of sounds. 

When saliva gathered under her tongue, Eugenie closed her mouth to swallow and allow her lungs a moment’s rest before resuming her attempts to overwork them to death. Falling silent for a moment allowed her ears to pick up a new sound. One reminiscent of the hyperventilation she’d just put a pause on. Though this one was coloured not by panic, as hers was, but by rage. Savagery.

Like an animal before it charged.

Time was on no man’s side and especially not hers, regrettably. From her incessant tugging, she had begun to feel the hold the shelf had on her sickle give way. But by the time she had her weapon in hand and ready to receive her magic, she reckoned she’d already have a throat full of teeth and both feet firmly planted at the gates of the Underworld.

Of all the many methods Eugenie imagined she’d happen upon her death, common sense admonished her for not taking into account this special scenario. Death delivered onto her by one of the only people in the whole world that had ever shown her love of the realest, most sincere kind. The person she had abandoned to a life of servitude and abuse to better hers.

The person even after everything she had learned and done, she still couldn’t pay her debt to and save.

Perhaps it was some kind of karmic justice. And that the dignified thing would be to allow her sister to close the distance between them and give her the end she deserved. One full of pain and gore and mercilessness. Surely that was the intention of the universe for allowing these sets of events to occur in such a way.

Allowing her to stupidly deprive herself of sleep for days on end, all for fear that she’d be attacked by the man she had offended, so that when she finally did succumb to her debilitation and sleep, it was like the dead. To allow her exhaustion to completely overtake her so that as she slept, she might feel the residue of her magic upon the silver traps ebb away, but be absolutely powerless to do anything about it but deal with the consequences of it now.

Or rather not deal with it. Die because of it.

Perhaps these circumstances had been tailored to perfection to result in nothing short of her death. If not at the teeth of her sister, then at the hands of her makeshift landlord, who would surely hang her by the neck until she was dead now.

Because of her actions and inactions, the great library she’d called home for nearly a fortnight was in ruins. The place he was sworn to guard could hardly be distinguished from the rubble of the Belmont manor above her head now.

Considering what he did to the humans that had crossed him in the past, maybe it would be a mercy to allow her sister to end her now, when she wouldn’t be alive to feel her arsehole become acquainted with the tip of a wooden spear.

The slamming clacks of the beast’s claws against the ground of the repository echoed the beat of Eugenie’s pounding heart. With each bound across the floor, it drew nearer. As did her sickle.

She knew she should stop fighting. To sit still and await the biting—literally—bang of the gavel of cosmic justice to swing down upon her head.

But that leather-wrapped handle was so close. Just a few more tugs and she’d have it, she’d truly have it.

Eugenie cried openly and loudly now. The prayers and admonishments to herself she thought she’d been mumbling clumsily before came out then in barely intelligible slurs. Despite the butchering of their enunciations, the intent behind the words were yet understandable.

Fear in bold. Underlined and circled. Fear in all its entirety.

Like the coward she was, she feared death and all that it would mean, and fought against its currents even as she felt its waters lap at her mouth and nose. What did it say about her that she refused to give her sister this one last laugh, though it was at Eugenie’s own expense? Was her sister not owed this right? Had Eugenie not lived a long enough life?

“No, dammit,” she screamed as she pulled. Her sister was close enough now to push off the ground with her hind limbs and come down upon Eugenie, claws raised and fangs bared in preparation for the kill. And she did just that. Eugenie hunched her shoulders and forced her eyes open against the red, glowing, unblinking gaze of death. “Save me, ancestors!”

It was not the corporeal form of her amalgamated ancestors that burst into the room from the scattered doors, that much she was sound enough of mind to know. She had not lost her mind so thoroughly to see the blur of a humanoid figure tackle her sister’s body from the air and not recognize it. To see those flaxen locks catch in the green firelight and mistake it for some spiritual guardian from another plane of reality come to protect her against the monsters of her own creation. Though he was a close second.

Both blurs smashed into the brick wall to her left of the repository. Though initially, through the dust their little tussle had thrown up, she had seen but a single figure rise from the wreckage, a second joined it shortly thereafter. Soon, it was a battles of blows. Whipping tails and hair, flying bodies.

A longsword suddenly sailed through the air over her head and entered into the battle, tipping the scales in the favor of her landlord ever so slightly. It hung in the air all on its own by means of a magic she wasn’t familiar with, and delivered calculated nicks and slices to her sister.

A shallow cut to the back of one knee left the limb practically useless, dragging behind her beasty as it clawed and whipped its tail at the space where the vampire had been only a second ago. The sword cut expertly and adeptly along one side of the beast, and with its balance compromised, it gave the man an opening to pull his punching arms into his body and deliver a spinning kick into the side of the beast’s muzzle. It sent her sister flying into a display of creature bones, and her sister did not rise again.

It was over. Yet he advanced.

His shoulders rose and fell in pants, the fists at his sides almost as clenched as his jaw. This was not the body language of a man who acknowledged he was the victor. It was over, her sister unable to continue, and yet he meant to finish her.

No!

In one powerful, straining yank that she groaned all through, the blade of her sickle came free from under the shelf. Its handle fit snuggly in Eugenie’s grip, a tad slicked with blood, and she savored its presence for the second it stayed in her hand.

She too performed a spin of her own, this one to throw a sickle instead of a kick. Her blade soared in a rotating spin until it hit its intended target, clattering to the floor in a cacophony of scrapping metal along with the vampire’s sword that had up until that moment floated beside him as he crept up on her sister’s prone body at the bottom of the wrecked display of bones.

Her show of marksmanship succeeded in getting his attentions. He spun around on the spot, raising his balled up fist in preparation for an attack before spotting her through the dim light by the pile of books and upturned shelves.

“You’ll throw that back to me, will you not? I’ll need it for the binding spell.” Her voice wavered, cracked, dipped and shook. In that moment, she had not the power to feel even an ache of embarrassment.

The man stared. “Binding spell,” he repeated as though it were the two dumbest words he’d ever had the displeasure of hearing

“Aye. I’m going to do what I should have done and bind her. That means you’ll not be killing my sister.”

“This thing…this is not your sister, Eugenie.” He cupped his palms over nose and mouth, dragging his hands up into his hair to tug at where they met his scalp. “Look what it’s done to the repository. It nearly killed you, for Hell’s sake. Had I come a moment later, I loathe to imagine the sight I would have been met with. I should have slain it as soon as I saw it in that cart.”

“This is all my fault. Everything that’s happened is because of me, you see. But I can fix at least some of it. I can stop her now,” she said. “I only need you to keep her here, beaten, while I fetch her binds.”

“Eugenie, I must end this creature. I simply must.”

“Then you’ll be ending me soon thereafter. Are you prepared to do that as well?” A bold thing to be asking of a man whom she’d provoked in a great measure the last time they’d spoken.

He said nothing for so long, she squinted through the darkness at where she’d last seen him, trying to make sure he was still there. She had her answer from him soon, though, when a flying object suddenly appeared in the air headed for her. Eugenie gasped and retreated several steps.

She hadn’t a reason to fear, however, as the object landed just right in front of her, as calculated a throw as hers had been. The tip of its sharpened bronze pommel tapped the tip of her boot. Her sickle. She sucked in a breath.

A voice, dour and put upon, sounded out, “Retrieve your straps posthaste before I have enough time to rethink this idiotic plan of yours.”

Her answering sprint to the receiving room outside of the repository was the fastest she’d ever run in her life, she was sure of it, and her prompt halting as soon as her feet crossed the threshold into that room had to have been the fastest she’d ever stopped. It had been foolish of her to think her eyes had passed their quota for widening already, that not another sight could inspire her to astonishment any more, after all she had already seen.

There was her cart, turned over on its side with a torn tarpaulin, but otherwise intact. As were her pails, her clothes and her knapsack. What was definitely not intact, however, was Gertrude.

There was barely anything of her left to gawk at. Her belly had been hollowed out, picked clean of all her organs and intestines, leaving over the lines of her spine and ribcage exposed to the world and to the cloud of flies that already made themselves welcome on her remains. Two of her legs where nowhere to be found, but Eugenie could wager they, and the pounds of flesh of Gertrude’s organs were what had coated her beast in a wash of blood and slowed down its movements.

The horse’s limbs were locked, crooked in the stiffness following death. Her tongue lay flapped out of her mouth on the ground between her exposed teeth and her brown eyes, once full of ire at Eugenie stared into nothingness, clouded over and as empty as her stomach. At least she faced the night sky as she was devoured alive.

The cloud of flies dispersed, hovering not away but around as Eugenie knelt by her horse’s head and ghosted a hand over the mane clotted with blood. Gertrude’s own blood.

Had she been scared? Eugenie had been scared when she thought she was about to bite it. The only difference between their two fates seemed to be timing.

The hand Eugenie held shaking over Gertrude closed into a trembling fist. For a second and only a single second, she considered staying out there, in the receiving room and simply cradling Gertrude’s head in her lap. She considered leaving the vampire, and her sister, to his whims.

So much havoc and for what? Why not let the chips fall where they may? Cut her losses?

Leave her sister, again?

Eugenie stood at that last thought. Gave Gertrude one glance and didn’t look at her again as she searched around the upturned cart for the cords of silver she’d nailed around the beast to the bed of the wagon. They lay in a coil, one end still nailed, under the cart. After another round of heaving, she pulled them free and sprinted back into the library.

The vampire still circled the prone form of her beast, the tip of his sword pointing dangerously close to one closed eye, as if daring it to open and receive the bite of the blade. He had his back turned to Eugenie as she rushed toward them. Passing him with speed didn’t afford her time to turn to look at his face as she stood over her sister, unrolling the coil of the silver before dropping it in a heap on the floor by her feet.

It was when she raised her sickle, preparing to invoke the binding spell on the silver that she caught movement out of the corner of her eye that had the words halting in her throat.

Oh, it was a look of horror unlike anything she’d ever seen. A look so visceral in its intensity, she doubted her imagination, even as wild as it ran, could ever concoct a horrible enough backstory for the people impaled on those spikes. For the people that had apparently hurt him, as it appeared, had done so with the aid of similar silver traps.

Silver was an effective tool against creatures of the darkness. Its primary use, when paired with a good holding spell, was the bind them. Sometimes, long enough to be transported from one location to another. Sometimes, long enough to be killed.

Eugenie had seen those spiraling scars on his arms and chest the first day she had met him, and had an inkling of an idea of what had given them to him. Seeing his reaction to her silver traps now only confirmed her suspicions. And if it they were the case, this man had been hurt. Badly.

His sword fell and clattered to the ground. A hand over his mouth and the other arm thrown over his abdomen, he backed away from the sight of the binds on the floor. A jumble of incoherency spilled from his lips, and his wide, reddening eyes darted every which way, but they always came back to the binds. With every glance at them, he grew all the more agitated. All the more tortured.

Eugenie only tore her eyes away from his trembling figure when she heard a low, clicking groan from the other trembling figure beneath her. Her beast was waking!

She hurried along with her spell, swiping her sickle in a downward arc and commanding the binds to unwind and rewind themselves along her beasty’s body. They did as her magic intended, and the hiss of burning flesh accompanied the much louder howls and groans from the monster. Eugenie had backed away almost as much as the vampire by then, and the two watched in silence as the green glow faded from the traps and her beasty writhed and fought and howled and snarled.

His silence, one of a man lost in the clutches of a distant memory. Hers that of solemn yet savored victory. Despite the universe’s best efforts, she lived to regret another day.


	5. 5

Much later, when the rays of the early morning’s sun had begun to crest over the edge of the hole above the receiving room, all their cleaning hadn’t even left a dent in the mess the repository had become. They’d righted a few shelves and recovered some scrolls and tomes, though they were left with several ripped out pages. The broken sculptures couldn’t be salvaged, and they’d pushed them into a corner on the ground floor, along with the smashed glass pieces and display cases, crushed animal skulls and dismantled shelves.

They’d worked all night to restore as much of the repository as they could, and they’d done so in relative silence. The only time they’d exchanged words had been when their cleaning had brought them to the recovery room, to Gertrude’s remains, and he had asked her in a quiet voice if she’d like a funeral. His previously sour countenance had given way to genuine shock and another unidentified emotion when she’d told him to leave the body where it laid, that her beast would eat the scraps later when its belly became vacant again, which judging by her sister’s appetites, would be soon.

He had helped her carry her beast from the repository back to the receiving room she guessed, more from thinking about the repository than for her. It wouldn’t do well to leave the instrument of the destruction amongst its ruins to continue said destruction at a later date.

He was so quiet. So blank in his face.

She was quiet as well, but only because she awaited that which she knew was coming. Her imminent eviction from the premises.

She would deserved it, too. The only thing her presence on his property had seemed to bring him was sadness, bad memories and devastation. If she were in his shoes, she would have sent herself packing days ago, if she ever even let herself stay in the first place.

What man in his right mind lets a woman traveling with a night creature into his home anyway? Who was to say this man was in his right mind in the first place? She reckoned one didn’t sit in a castle like the one up top all by their lonesome for an indeterminate amount of time and manage to keep all their wits about them. One simply did not.

Neither, it appeared, did he.

What a pair they made, him with his prison of a mind and her with her shackles of responsibility to the animal her sister had become.

The question of whether they would remain a pair had yet to be answered, and with the controlled way the man worked amongst the rubble, so single-minded and focused, it would go unanswered for a long while. The waiting game was in order, then. But Eugenie had never been a patient child, and it was a quality that evaded her all through her growth well into her adulthood. As she learned how to cast spells and incantations, it hadn’t occurred to her to add the skill of composure to her arsenal.

Eugenie moved about the receiving room in a hysteria she broke her back trying to hamper. Otherwise simply tasks proved to bear more difficulty than they should; her quivering hands made picking up broken pieces of wood an almighty undertaking. Her imagination put on its shoes and ran wild and free, dreaming up the myriad of ways her cleaning partner could end her life, and when she took her head from the clouds and came back down to the ground, she realized she’d been wiping the long gone dust off a tome’s cover for so long her bandaged hands had started to cramp.

Her distractedness had begun to manifest outward in her degenerating cleaning, and the man had started to take notice. More and more, he gave her odd looks as he worked out of the corner of his eye. They never lasted long enough to get the hair on the back of her neck rising to attention. Just long enough to have her ducking her head in qualm.

Finally, their unspoken standoff came to a head sometime in midday.

Eugenie had busied herself with righting her things that had been scattered around the room when her sister had broken free of her bindings while the man hefted the cart upright and settled her growling beast on its bed. She picked her knapsack off of the ground and beat the dust out of it against her thigh, keeping her eye on the man’s figure as he bent and coughed into his elbow.

This time, he did catch her staring. Moving with that inhuman-like speed, his head turned toward her at such a high velocity that if he were human, the only thing he would have managed to do by moving that fast was snap his own neck. As it were, hale and hearty, the man trapped Eugenie’s peeping gaze with a piercing stare of his own, one that offered her no avenue of escape. The look on his face, the one that hardened his eyes and pinched the skin above the bridge of his aquiline nose informed her that he’d tired of their little game of broiling thoughts and shifting eyes.

Relief and horror battled in her breast for the chance to be the more dominant emotion, but her attentions were surely split between the two. She would have an answer concerning the question of her tenancy after all. But on the other hand, she would have an answer concerning the question of her tenancy after all. A double-edged sword much like his own floating blade poised at her throat.

She waited with a bated breath that quickly ceased in her chest immediately upon the parting of his mouth. The man broke their eye contact and turned his gaze to the floor as if he could not bear the sight of her reaction to his next remarks.

The words that spilt from his throat were delivered in that same measured voice of his, now tinged with an awkwardness Eugenie did not know what to do with or to make of.

He said, “The nights here are cold, Eugenie. That is something a proper gentleman would never have allowed you find out for yourself. But I, set in my thinking, as wrong and partial as it was, not only attempted to confine you to this place. No, I also let you sleep down here in this dank, empty hold with not even with a suitable covering or so much as a pillow. I have brought great shame to myself for these slights against you, and for that, I am truly sorry.”

Seemingly unaware of her shocked silent state, he wiped his dirty hands on a kerchief he fetched from a pocket in his breeches before running them through his locks, admonishing himself in low tones all the while. Without lifting his gaze from the carpeted floor, he folded his arms across his chest, a wry smile born certainly not of mirth, contorting the shape of his lips and turning them into something bitter.

“And not only did I transgress against you, I also managed to mismanage the supervision of this place.” He gestured with a limp hand to the hold around them. “My friend entrusted me with the task of safeguarding his family’s legacy, and now here I stand, sifting through piles of rubbish, picking up the pieces of that very same legacy. How irresponsible of me it was to let a night creature of all things reside so close to a place of so much importance.”

“Surely the blame for that rests on my shoulders and mine alone,” she interjected, wringing her hands. Taking responsibility for the mess amidst which they stood was in truth the right thing to do, Eugenie knew, but she also knew it wouldn’t do well to remind the man that she was the architect to his failing his friend. She still had her own skin to save in all this. “I wasn’t paying adequate attention, you see. I let myself become tired and distracted. If anyone should get hided, it submit myself for the punishment.”

That last sentence put a genuine smile on the man’s face, which in turn restored the breath to her body. “Trevor does wield a whip…I’ll be sure to inform him of your submission when he returns to these parts. If he returns…”

As quickly as it had formed on his face, the man’s smile, the sardonic and the genuine one both sloughed off his face. The skin around his eyes tightened, lines of tension appeared on either side of his nose, giving his pale complexion a darkness as though a cloud had just appeared overhead solely to bar him from the warmth of the sunlight.

This was the second time he’d mentioned this Trevor man. The first in conjunction with another name…Sypha, it was. He spoke of them as if they were his friends, albeit ones he hadn’t connected with in some time; bringing them up seemed to have a bittersweet reaction in him.

So Eugenie had been right in her earlier musings that sequestering himself away in this place had caused his relationships to suffer and suffer greatly. Though during their initial encounter, he’d presented as though the thought of another soul on his premises offended him, his family, and the entire region of Wallachia, further interactions with him proved that this was not so. Case in point his allowing her to move to and fro around the manor and beyond even when they’d agreed she would do no such thing. Also, the spontaneous invitation into his home for breakfast he’d presented her with—though that had not ended anywhere remotely well.

Despite herself, and though she felt rightly dirty afterwards, Eugenie ruminated on ways she could capitalize on his obvious starvation for a connection of some sort. She thought of ways she could form a bond with him that would inspire him to reconsider should he get to thinking he’d had just about enough of her on his property.

At that time, the man expressed remorse at her living conditions, but he’d said nothing yet of changing them. If he didn’t like her living in the hold, where did he mean to put her then? Did he mean to let her stay at all?

The strange man had fallen silent once more, staring off into nothingness, seeming to fight a losing battle in his head with his own emotions. Though this was a bout of silence she would not suffer to live. She decided to save herself from another fat stretch of time full of anxiety, and him from another tornado of upsetting memories that would sweep him off his feet and throw him down into the dumps.

While he pushed the heel of his palm into his eyes, shutting them tightly against the world, Eugenie bit at her thumbnail and gave it a go.

“It is not in my best interest to say this, I will admit, but I would understand if my sister and I were no longer welcome here,” she said. “But I implore you to let us stay. Please. I simply cannot leave now, not when I’m finally making some headway in my research.”

Her words worked to entice the man out of the beckoning embrace of his thoughts. He looked at her for a long while before he said, “Do you think I mean to kick you out?”

“Don’t you? I would kick me out.”

“Would you really?”

“After all that I’ve done, I would,” she said. “Hopefully, you’re a better person than I am. Hopefully, you can either remember my previous offer of an arrangement, or we can come to a new one of your creation. And I won’t have to take up arms against you for the right to the repository.”

Hearing that, he chuckled, a hand on his chest. “You would not fight me.”

“Yes. I would.”

He looked into her eyes and saw that she was serious. And she was. If worse came to worst, if he moved like a predator and backed her up far into the corner that she could no longer bargain her way into an escape, she would react like prey. Her last resort would be to eliminate him from the equation all together. Or at least, make a valiant attempt to, before he ripped out her throat and her blood died the carpet of the receiving room an even deeper red.

Briefly, Eugenie searched her brain for the whereabouts of her sickle and located it on the seat of her cart at her back, and her body twitched to turn to the right. To prepare to fetch it should this situation take a turn for the slaughterous.

Nodding slowly, the man gave her that same strange look as though he only just realized her true nature was as unknown to him as his was to her. Eugenie was slightly satisfied to know they were in the same camp at least in that respect.

“There’ll be no bloodshed today, if I have a say in it. I would not send you away, Eugenie.”

“In spite of everything?”

“In spite of everything, I am still sympathetic to your plight.” Had his words not frozen her to the spot, she might have taken a step back to match the one he’d taken forward. Now, he leaned on his left hip against the seat of her cart, a stone’s throw away from where she stood around the back wheels. “I would not send you away. I—I can’t. Not now…”

He trailed off, looking confused at what he’d just divulged. Then going from looking confused to looking alarmed at himself, looking worried at her in such a way that one would think he’d just confessed his undying love for her and promised to seek out her father to ask for her hand in marriage.

In short order, though, he shook himself, cleared his throat and continued. “Nevertheless, I do have some amendments to our earlier agreement. One being that in the future, I’ll have to be present with you in the repository at all times. My apologies, Eugenie, but I no longer trust that I can leave you down here on your own, unchaperoned to your own devices. You must understand.”

She was already nodding. “I do. And the other amendments?”

“Just the one other. As I don’t feel comfortable leaving you to the repository, I cannot in good conscience continue to allow you to abide here.” He took a deep breath, his eyes darting from her to the side. “You can have rooms in the castle. One for you and your sister on the first floor, closer to the ground, and far from my residence in the fourth. What say you?”

What say she? What say she?

If she wasn’t sure about it before, this hammer beat the final nail into the coffin and laid her to rest. This man truly was mad. She had no other explanation for his behavior than the explanation of derangement.

First, he had his heart set on killing her, now he wanted to live with her?

Sure, she could attribute this to his want for conversation and connection, but she could just as easily recognize it to be a sign of his mental unsoundness. Dealing, or rather not dealing with him, was made easy by her being in the hold, by her not having her paths superimposed over his. But living with him in the same castle, no matter how big a castle it was, would surely force her to interact with him on a daily basis, wouldn’t it?

Was this not the opportunity you were hoping would fall from the heavens into your lap? Her inner voice scolded her. A chance to bond with him. A chance to cement her position in his life as least for just long enough to help her sister with the aid of the repository.

Still, the press of fear caused her inhales to be labored. Beads of perspiration birthed at her temples and rolled down the sides of her face, pooling at her shaking chin. Eugenie wrung her fingers together, eying her sister’s lowly growling, ever-struggling body next to her.

He wasn’t in much better shape himself. Evidently, she’d taken too long to answer, and as a result, he’d begun running his hand through his hair again, no doubt kicking himself for his forwardness. He toed the carpet with his booted foot, lips pursed. His eyes met up with their longtime acquaintance, the ground, and only lifted from it when she breathed out a long suffering sigh and threw her hands up in exasperation.

“I still don’t even know your name!” Eugenie cried.

Blinking, the man paused. “I am Alucard,” he said plainly. “The anti-Dracula, I’m called. But…but my mother gave me the name Adrian. Adrian Tepes.”

Once again, Eugenie found herself wishing she knew of the art of composure. If she did, perhaps she could have controlled her features to remain passive at this new information. As it happened, however, her brows shot so high into the sky, they kissed the dark side of the moon, and if her mouth fell any lower, it’d graze the tops of her shoes. At her expression, the man—Alucard—blew out a sigh and resumed his kicking of the carpet.

She had heard stories of the Alucard during her travels with her sister in the various villages she made stops at. The son of Dracula and the mortal woman he took into his home. The reason the genocide perpetrated by Dracula’s night hordes had finally ceased, the reason peace now reigned upon the land. Stories she’d regarded as just that—stories. Tales to excite the ears of little children before they were put to bed.

Eugenie had thought she’d put two and two together when she’d first met the man in the castle everyone knew to be Dracula’s. She’d called him as much on their first meeting, and he’d become saddened by it. Who wouldn’t, if someone had accused you of being your father, your own father the stories said you’d had to slay to achieve the peace everyone now enjoys?

She’d been staring, tactless and openly, and Alucard soaked up all of her surprise with a sardonic smile. “This was what I wanted to avoid.” He shook his head. “This recognition. I quite liked the anonymity your not knowing just who I was afforded me. I like it because the last humans that came to this castle asking for my help, they’d heard all the stories. They knew of my legend and sought me out. And look how that ended.”

That was all he offered on the topic, and with the cutting look he levelled at her, as if he sensed she was about to inquire about it, that was all there was to be on the topic. For now, at the very least.

Brushing away dust from her coat, Eugenie turned it around on him. “Knowing your name does tell me a lot about you, Alucard. Unfortunately for you though, my measly little moniker doesn’t come accompanied by notoriety. You don’t know anything about the person you’ve just invited into your home. Does history repeat itself?”

“I should say not,” he said. “Fine, then. Let’s hear it.”

“It?”

“Your own story. The story of the woman named Eugenie. Just Eugenie. No last name, I’ve noticed. Isn’t that strange?”

She smiled. “It won’t be, when you hear my story.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Turning slightly to lean on his back against the seat, he crossed his arms over his chest and gave her his full attention. “Begin.”

An order so happily given. This man really was something of an aristocrat. Given the quality of his lineage, his lineage she was now aware of, she didn’t doubt his claim to aristocracy for a second.

Though, Eugenie did as he instructed. She began.

“My mother was from somewhere in West Africa, as was my father, I presume. They came to this region from Portugal as slaves, lived and had children as slaves, and died as they lived—as slaves. Neither my sister nor I remember much about them. I was four and she was six when we were taken from them and sold to a new master in Wallachia. A gregarious old lout whose throat that I remember even at the age of four, I longed to slit. We lived on his homestead for six years with one other slave girl from the Ottoman Empire and the rest of his old, loutish family. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life in that place…until he came through the municipality.

“I didn’t know anything about Master Ahn, only that he dressed strangely, with his cloaks and gleaming blades. Only that he had brown skin like me, and he was free where I was not.

“He’d come with a troupe of scholars like himself. They announced in the city square that they were looking for recruits, preferably young children to learn their tricks and magicks. Within a day, the unwashed masses had rallied the men of the church, sharpened their pitchforks on leather strops and lit their torches in a group bonfire, aiming to drive the troupe out. And they did, but not before I’d joined them.

“I left that God-awful farm with only the clothes on my back. No shoes, no food, nothing. I’d had to swear three oaths: to abandon my given name and assume another, to abandon my home and never again return to it, and lastly to abandon my family.

“The first and second were the easiest; as slaves, my sister and I weren’t given names by our master to begin with. We were simply called ‘it’, ‘she’, and ‘them’. The second; I never saw the farm and the village as my home, so turning my back on them both proved to be very easy. And the third; I had thought I could convince my sister to leave with me, to take this new chapter in our lives together, so I wouldn’t have to abandon her at all. But she didn’t.

“She chose to remain with the fate she knew well and good, rather than risk it with people she perceived to be vagrants and vagabonds. I mean, she was right. They were vagrants and vagabonds. They were also Forgemasters.

“I travelled all over Europe with them, and I studied the magick of necromancy under them for eleven years. A few more years and I would have been a Forgemaster in my own right. However, when we were in Moldavia, I heard word that Dracula’s hoard were wreaking havoc across Wallachia. I wouldn’t have cared a smidge if I hadn’t remembered my sister still lived somewhere in Wallachia.

“I had always planned to return to her when my education was complete, though that was against the rules. But now, I couldn’t even wait that long. She’s all I have left—I had to save her. I stole away in the night and road for weeks until I reached the homestead. I hadn’t ridden fast enough.

“By the time I reached the village, it was already in shambles. Half the population had been turned into creatures of the night, and they devoured the other half. I fought through waves of them before I reached what used to be the farm. There, a beast knocked down walls with its tail and dragged its claws against the ruined floors. If I didn’t have the magic to recognize the familiar feel of the remnant of her life energy, I would have slain the beast without realizing it was my sister. My darling sister, made an animal by some evil, wicked, vile Forgemaster.”

Eugenie felt something hot and fat caress down her cheek with a single touch. It dripped from the apex of her chin and fell onto her collarbone. Many drops followed it soon after, and she had to paused in her narration to swipe under her running nose with the fabric of her tunic.

“I subdued her with my magic and those traps, and kept her barricaded in what was left of the farmhouse. I’d figure out what to do about her later, but first, we had to survive until the morning. I fought scores of night creatures that picked up the scent of my life energy and came to snuff it out. It may have lasted only a handful of hours, but that was the longest night of my life. Then the morning came and with it, the exodus of the creatures. They would return by nightfall, so I worked to be out of there before the sun set. I raided homes and carts for food and supplies, and found a cart. In the next town over, I met Gertrude and Louise, and stole them. I loaded my sister onto the cart and left the village for the last time.”

Alucard shook his head, frowning. “But you didn’t finish your studies. How could you have hoped to help your sister with only approximately half of your knowledge on necromancy? Couldn’t you return to your old group for help?”

“I’d broken two out of three of their oaths. If I went back to them, they’d leave my sister alone, but they’d turn me into a night creature right alongside her. We’d be a matching set. No, I couldn’t go back. Ever. So I had to go forward.

“There’s only one other group I’d heard of while I travelled with my teachers that had a quite robust knowledge of all things monstrous. The Belmont family; nearly every village we visited had tales of their own about the infamous family of monster hunters. The most interesting tale was the one about their downfall. Excommunicated by the Church and promptly exterminated soon after. Their family home burned to the ground and their line ended. Though the only people that could have maybe possibly helped me were all dead, I heard their knowledge had not shared the same fate.

“Rumor has it there existed a repository of all the knowhow all the generations of the Belmonts had amassed over the years. The location of this repository was debated to death amongst scholars in the magic community. Some said it was in a church somewhere, though I couldn’t see how that could be true. The Church hated the Belmonts, and I mean, the ire must have been reciprocated. Other locations were spewed out, but the only one that made sense to me was the rumor of the bunker underneath the burned down manor itself, protected by magic older than and stronger than any one of us. I set my course right for it and I must say, it was a rather difficult journey.

“Did you know women travelling alone are at a greater risk to be attacked on the road? I didn’t, until I was a woman travelling alone. Most of my attackers ran away with their tails between their legs when they saw I travelled with a night creature in the back of my wagon. But some were undeterred, and proceeded with their attack, so most ended up dead. Though I had a few close calls.”

“Close calls?”

“Attempted rapes and the like.”

“Oh, my word! Eugenie, are you—?”

“I’m all right, Alucard, fret not. I’ve seen many a horror, but I knew it was all worth it when I reached my destination. When I arrived here and found what I was looking for. Now I have hope for my sister. I have hope I can learn what I need so that we can be reunited again.”

He was quite for a long time as he listened to her laugh at the memory. Then he pushed himself off the cart with his back and turned to face her, a grimace playing at his features.

“Do you understand the mechanics of Forgemastery?” He asked. Eugenie lost her smile.

“I know enough.”

“Then you must surely know your sister, in essence and spirit, is not in that beast?”

She swallowed. “I know they cast out her soul from her body in order to install the essence of a demon, but that’s still her body, as warped and twisted as it has become,” she said. “That is still a part of my sister. So at least I have that to work with.

“I’ve been reading up on ways to help her for days straight. I had no solid lead but one possible way. One possible way to drive the essence of the demon residing in my sister’s body back into the pits of Hell from whence it came.” She scrubbed a hand over her face. “But included is a component I am not in possession of.”

“That being?”

“A priest.” Although his chin snapped down as he looked at her, he didn’t say another word, so she continued. “My plan had been to take my horse and ride into the nearest hamlet. Kidnap a priest and bring him back here to perform my exorcism. By fire or by force. But I have a horse to ride no longer. You can imagine my dilemma, I trust.”

“I certainly can.” And they fell into a companionable silence. His of contemplation and hers of reflection.

Just as he had been cooped up in his castle all by his lonesome, her journey toward the manor hadn’t exactly been a shindig were all were invited. She’d had her sister to talk to while on the road, but the answering growls and howls hadn’t always inspired Eugenie to continue chatting.

She stayed in villages every now and then, but never long enough to sit someone down and really have them listen to her, have them empathize with her. Most of the villagers she encountered wanted her, and her precious cargo in the back of her wagon, gone as soon as possible.

She would be hard pressed to admit aloud that it had been nice to tell someone about her story. To be seen completely.

Eugenie bit her lip and wished she had the anatomy that would allow her to kick herself. It seemed Alucard wasn’t to be the only one to get something out of their little arrangement of companionship.

“Perhaps,” he began, stopped, and tried again. “Perhaps, all hope isn’t lost, Eugenie. Perhaps there is still a way you can get your priest.”

“Mister Tepes.” She raised a brow. “What are you getting at?”

“I did say that I was fast on my feet.”

And he grinned.


End file.
